Another "cannot import boot-pool" issue (possible OS SSD failure?)

TrueNAS General
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Hi,

the forum seems flooded with people having this kind of issue, but I’m not finding anything which fixes it in my case.

I was in the middle of a read/write operation when TrueNAS SCALE 24.10.2 (on bare metal) became completely non-responsive. It showed this on screen:

IMG_20250309_155347_022 share
IMG_20250309_155347_022 share1920×1137 260 KB

I was finally forced to do a hard power-cycle. Now it can’t mount boot-pool.

IMG_20250309_162528_154
IMG_20250309_162528_1541920×1041 140 KB

I tried doing imports with the f, F, and/or X switches, but that just sits for a bit saying the interface was slow, then errors out again, telling me that the pool was last used by a different device, and that I should mount it manually. Any idea what I should try here?

The BIOS recognizes all drives, as does the ZFS subsystem in CLI. I also tried booting to 24.10.1, which unsurprisingly had the same problem. Assorted combinations of power cycles and attempting to force mount the pool got nowhere.

Update:
I tried swapping in a new OS drive (the “old” one was about 2 months old), and installing SCALE on there. It recognizes my pool, but wants the pool’s encryption key in order to mount, which I deliberately never set up, but somehow got enabled anyway. I tried plugging the old OS drive into a differnt system and running checkdisk on it, but that is acting strangely. Still working on it. Maybe I can extract the key from the old drive, somehow?? (I believe I’ve read that it is contained by the pool itself, so probably not. However, the OS had some way to decrypt the pool. Wouldn’t that be stored on the OS drive? It is impossible for the only decryption key, to be encrypted, yet for the system to automatically decrypt the pool when it initializes.)

Update 2:
I’m out of ideas. If no one else has any ideas, I suppose I’ll wipe everything and rebuild. I’ll take about a 2% data loss. With a few days of work, it is recoverable. However, my patience for TrueNAS is running short. In the two months I’ve been using it, it has just been one problem after another. Is using this platform just expected to be a tinkering project? I need something reliable, not something to keep me busy…

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Well, in the absence of any better ideas, I wiped everything and rebuilt from scratch. I had redundancies so I didn’t loose too much data, but still…that should not happen to a rig only a couple months old.

I’ve added even more redundancy, but if it breaks again…yikes.

To anyone finding this thread five years from now and hoping for solutions…sorry, they aren’t here. This was an irrecoverable software failure of either ZFS, or TrueNAS, on a two-month-old setup. The hardware is fine, and running the new install just fine. It does not seem to have been an issue with the boot SSD.

3

Lots of assumtions from your side here. I understand you are frustrated. But honestly, I never heard of Truenas creating a secret encryption key by itself.
I suggest, that you post you complete hardware setup as a start. This will more likely attract the more ZFS savvy people to your thread.