Adding to boot pool, mirrored, now won't boot

TrueNAS General
1

New forum member, though I’ve been using TrueNAS for a couple of years now. I recently updated to Scale without issues…I don’t believe this has anything to do with the current issue.

The storage situation when it still worked:

  • a 240GB SATA SSD as a boot drive
  • 4 3TB SATA HDDs as the storage pool; a few shares, nothing tricky

The hardware situation (here’s where it gets grisly):

  • a 15-year-old HP Z400 Xeon workstation, 4-core, 8-thread\
  • 24GB memory (6x4GB ECC DIMMs); yes, an odd number, but that’s the max allowed
  • BIOS as up-to-date as possible; that is, not very
  • 6 onboard SATA ports, 3Gb/s; speed’s not an issue

Here’s the situation…after reading about mirroring the boot pool and thinking that it was a good idea, I started thinking hard about how I’d go about doing so. Thinking is what usually gets me in trouble.

I conceived a mad plan of installing a pair of M.2 PCIE SSDs (240GB) in PCIE x4 cards, with the intent of mirroring one of them to the SATA boot drive, silvering, rebooting to make sure everything worked, shutting down, and removing the SATA drive and booting off the new drive, with the intent of then mirroring the second new drive with the first.

I installed the two new SSDs, booted up, and Scale saw both drives without an issue. Mirrored the first new one to the old boot drive, which was reported as successful. I then rebooted, and sure enough, it crapped itself. After the POST, this was on the display:

Attempting Boot From Hard Drive
GRUB loading…
WELCOME TO GRUB!

…and a perpetual flashing cursor. Poop. I was afraid that the new SSDs would be too new for a box this old, but I just figured it wouldn’t be able to boot from them, at worst…I thought it’d at least boot off the old SSD.

It’s still at the GRUB screen right now. Some things have occurred to me that has given me cause to stop and consider things. I haven’t yet powered-down and removed the new SSDs, which was my first impulse.

I’m having to assume at this point that Yes, this old computer is too dumb to know what to do with the new SSDs, even if Scale sees them just fine, which will Yes, prevent it from booting off them.

My concern right now is, what if integrating the new SSD into the boot pool has irrevocably changed the system config in such a way that will still prevent booting, even after removing the new SSDs? Is this right or wrong? Can I yank them out and have everything revert back to a functional system, or have I buggered things up?

Thanks in advance for your advice and derision.

2

Good news; if you had a copy of your config saved you’re fine & can even re-install entirely & reload config if you wish.

Things I’d check: see if enabling/disabling ‘safe boot’ in bios does the needful. See if EUFI vs legacy boot makes any difference (this and safeboot are sometimes a single option, under which ever name mobo felt like). See if you can pick which of the two boot drives you can chose in the bios (if 1 doesn’t work, try the other - though if one won’t let you boot then it is a really pointless mirror :stuck_out_tongue:)

3

I think you will be fine if you reboot, call up the BIOS boot menu. If the new SSDs are listed, try choosing the one you mirrored boot to. If that doesn’t work reboot and choose the old boot drive in BIOS.

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  1. Like a fool, I didn’t backup the config. I did, however, back up the contents of the server, so rebuilding everything and then copying everything back is the only option, though a slow one.

  2. This thing is so old that things like “safe boot” and “UEFI” are unknown to it. Nothing should’ve changed in the BIOS, anyways…I hope, anyways. I did check the BIOS, and nothing seemed unusual.

  3. The BIOS doesn’t see the new drives at all. I think it expects additional BIOS controls from a controller card, rather than having drives plugged directly into PCIE slots. Again, it’s too old and dumb.

I went ahead and shut things down, yanked the new drives, and rebooted. It’s still locking up at the GRUB screen…totally unresponsive to the keyboard. So, yeah, it appears I’ve buggered it.

I guess my next question is, can TrueNAS do a re-install, freshening up an existing installation, or does it only do clean installs? I suspect it’s the latter, but if I can recover the existing setup, it’d take a lot less time than restoring the backed-up data. Yes…I’m a fool for not saving the config.

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Your boot drive and pool was entirely separate from your data disks and pool?

Reinstall, import pool(s) if you have too. Redo shares? I think that’s all you have to do

It’s more of a clean install than a reinstall and ready to go deal.

6

Unless you were one of those folks who partitioned his boot drive for some reason all your data should be jsut fine. Only pain would be re-installing & setting up your config, permissions, etc. Which if you’re a home user should take like… maybe 30 minutes since you’ve already figured it out once before? Your data on all the other pools should be just fine & dandy!

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I…did not know I could import the existing pools. Doing so now. And…it’s done.

Holy crap…this is a huge timesaver. Re-doing the shares and permissions will be trivial. Thank you very, VERY much.

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My next question in this whole mess is:

When I was re-installing Scale (from scratch; I upgraded Core via the web UI before), at one point I had the option of “enabling EFI Boot” (paraphrasing) to allow for booting from NVMe drives, like what got me into this mess in the first place. I went ahead and enabled it, figuring it couldn’t hurt. What I’m wondering, is if this will now allow me to successfully do what I tried before, or should I go ahead and assume that the BIOS is still too old and dumb to allow something like that to work?

At this point, I’m not even convinced that I can successfully mirror the boot drive with another SATA SSD, given the situation. I know that Scale can do it just fine, but I’m expecting the PC to crap itself again if I try it. I have an extra onboard SATA port, but I don’t know if that’ll be sufficient.

10

You can mirror the boot drive after installation

11

Back up your configuration. Does your motherboard support UEFI? Guessing it’s BIOS only.

If you want, add in a SATA SSD and try to mirror again. If it fails, just reinstall like you did and use your configuration to speed up recovery.

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