Help recovering TrueNAS installation!

TrueNAS General
1

Hi guys, new here and new to the world of TrueNAS!

I set up an old PC as a storage server a couple of months back but after a power failure, I am having trouble getting it to start up again. There isn’t anything super important on there, but part of the reason I set this up was to learn the system so I would like to attempt a recovery if possible!

Here’s a quick bit of info on the system before I get started, just in case it matters. The PC is an old 7th gen i5 with 8gb of ram. The OS is installed on an NVME ssd and the storage pool is currently 4x 1tb WD Sata drives.

The error I’m getting is “Cannot import ‘boot-pool’: one or more devices is currently unavailable” which I believe means something has gone wrong with the actual OS installation, rather than the storage pool.

So far, I’ve tried running zpool import which said everything was online and I’ve also tried zpool import -F -n boot-pool which resulted in the same error I’m greeted with when I try to start it normally. The PC has not been opened between when it was and wasn’t working, so none of the drives have been re-ordered physically at least but the BIOS battery did die (which I have now replaced) so its possible I guess that the order that they show up in the BIOS has changed but I doubt that’s the issue.

I get several lines of errors before the final error message that say:
critical medium error, dev nvme0n1, sector 76875392 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 2 prio class 0 zio pool=boot-pool vdev=/dev/nvme0n1p3 error=61 type=1 offset=38820184064 size=69632 flags=3146128
This error is repeated 6 times with the only difference being the flags number.

This is leading me to suspect the boot SSD has failed. If I replace the SSD and reinstall the OS, will I be able to recover the storage pool or is there a better way to do it?

And yes I know, I should’ve had a UPS!
I have since purchased one so when I get this working again there should be no more sudden power outages!

Cheers!

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Do you have a downloaded System Configuration from the install? New install over a new boot device and upload your System Configuration.

Otherwise, a new install over a new boot device, import data pool if system didn’t pick it up and then get back to fixing any item such as SMB shares, users, networking, etc.

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You should be able to as the boot pool is not related to the storage pool. The boot pool itself is actually rather expendable and can just be wiped clean with little consequence other than the fact that you would have to re-configure your users and services unless you backed up your system configuration file. It’s not hard to do, but it can be tedious.

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Obligatory warning that if the data pool is key encrypted and the OP hasn’t saved a copy of the key, they are in trouble.

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Ahh good point. This is why I don’t encrypt my pool. I do not hold state secrets that warrant it and I am not a big fan of self-imposed ransomware… which I have seen quite many people do to themselves over the years of lurking these forums.

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Thanks guys, I ended up replacing the boot drive and reinstalling TrueNAS and it is all back up and running now! My storage pool isn’t encrypted so that wasn’t a problem, but I will see if I can work out how to create a backup of the System Configuration so that I can more easily restore if it happens again! I even managed to get the UPS to talk to it to, so it will now shut itself down safely if the power goes out for more than a couple of minutes.

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From UI go System>Advanced>Manage Configuration (on Button)>Download File.

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