I need some help. I’ve corrupted the boot disk and my system won’t boot.
I do have a USB that I used to install the NAS a few years ago and the system will boot with this USB, but I’d like to recover the pool configuration that I had before. Before my boot drive died, I was getting an I/O error on one of my disks in the data pool and was hoping to replace that drive and have the system rebuild it. I am somewhat of a newbie with regard to NAS operations and TrueNas, so I’m not sure what commands to run to figure out the status of the data pool or where to find the configuration I had on the system.
I’m hoping that someone can help confirm the steps I should follow to recover.
I think, it might be something like: save the configuration from the data pool.
Reconstruct the boot disk and reboot with the original configuration. I’m not sure of the details, but I know when I boot with the installing USB, I don’t want to install right away, I want to find the configuration and save that before proceeding.
My boot disk is failing to load the kernel. I have a “Welcome to TrueNas” menu,
but I also get a “zio:…error:5” and the kernel fails to load. This probably means I need to rebuild the boot disk. I can boot the installer USB, but I’m not sure of the commands to find my configuration information.
I’d appreciate any helpful comments and references. Thanks in advance
Configuration:
TrueNAS 13.0-U3.1 installed Jan 1 2023. I installed a couple of updates.
data pool is 6 disks in RAIDZ2 configuration.
Running on local LAN with ethernet cables.
Server motherboard is a SuperMicro MBD-X11SSH-LN4F-0
My boot disk was an SSD drive 240Gb - it is reporting block errors on boot.
Do you have a new boot drive to install? Is there any reason why you stuck with TrueNAS 13.0-U3.1 and didn’t upgrade TrueNAS Core versions? At this time, TrueNAS Core is, essentially dead, and all resources go to TrueNAS Scale development.
A full system description with all the features you were using will help with recommendations. Did you use FreeBSD Jails, SMB file sharing, etc.
If you can’t get your system to boot and don’t have a copy of a recent system configuration, you may have to set up all shares, jails, etc again.
Thank you for responding. I built the NAS for my husband who needed to backup data, but I didn’t have time to upgrade and I know it needs updating. We don’t use jails, I think we were only using SMB and NFS. We are getting a couple of new boot drives to install. I was just looking over the migration page for CORE to SCALE.
Do you have a downloaded system configuration, even if it is an earlier version. Using that may save having to setup up SMB, NFS, user changes, etc. Even if you do a fresh install on a boot device with Core 13.0u8, the base pools should import okay.
@winnielinnie@HoneyBadger If we boot a TrueNAS Core install usb, where would we find the system config file? Is that possible to get with a possible bad boot device?
There is no “pool configuration” to save. A ZFS pool can be imported (in a healthy state) if all vdevs and members are available. Nothing on the boot-pool tells ZFS how to configure other pools. The TrueNAS configuration you’re thinking of is for services, shares, tasks, schedules, users, and so on.
This is probably what you will end up having to do.
If the boot-pool is healthy, you can technically retrieve the files using a FreeBSD or any modern Linux live ISO.
Import the boot-pool without auto-mounting anything:
zpool import -N boot-pool
Mount the dataset:
zfs set mountpoint=/recovery
zfs mount -o ro boot-pool/ROOT/13.0-U3.1
The needed files will be under /recovery/data/. They are freenas-v1.db and pwenc_secret and freenas-v1.db.bak and pwenc_secret.bak.
I doubt this will work, since it sounds like the SSD died.
The other option is to retrieve it from the System Dataset, if it was not placed in the boot-pool. In a live FreeBSD or Linux session, you’ll need to import the data pool and locate the files inside the System Dataset.
Thank you @SmallBarky and @winnielinnie for your very helpful information. I have recovered my NAS to version 13.0-U6.8 with a configuration I managed to retrieve from the boot-pool/ROOT/default dataset. I had to boot with a Ubuntu 25.10 live USB to get access to the boot-pool, mount it, and found the freenas-v1.db file.
It was nice to see that the configuration was recovered to include the 2 boot drives whereas in the old configuration I only had one. Lesson learned–keep backups of the NAS configuration.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
Next I will need to work on replacing my failing drive in my data-pool and then I will work on migrating to TrueNAS SCALE.
