I have a HP Proliant Microserver with TrueNAS installed.
There are 4 SATA3 disks in it. There is an usb stick inserted on the mainboard, so I guess the system is there.
I bought this with disks already installed and it has been working until yesterday.
Yesterday I switched it on and after taking forever to appear on the network it worked for some hours, then disappeared.
Pinging the address (or the “truenas” mnemonic) in the terminal on my wifi connected laptop gave me 100% packets lost.
I rebooted the system multiple times.
The Microserver is usually connected with a router via Ethernet port and I access it from my home wifi.
In order to exclude it is a wifi problem I connected my laptop directly via Ethernet cable, but no success.
So I connected a VGA monitor to it and I could follow the boot process seeing several *errors
*. Some of them could be “normal” (looking for something that is not there, but it is not supposed to be, and so on). But at the end of all the scrolling, the process stopped.
Solar is: WARNING: Pool "boot-pool’ has encountered an uncorrectable I/O failure and has been suspended.
My questions are:
is it something that can ve fixed without losing the data I have on the pool?
is reinstalling TrueNAS an option?
considered that the hardware is old, what version should I look for?
if nothing works (and I really hope it’s not the case), is there a way to buy a new hardware with 4 disk slots, inserting the disks there and see my data again?
Thank you everybody!
Cris.
PS. I have images of the boot process. The error text above is a result of an OCR from one of the pictures and may be not that accurate.
The boot pool is broken - which is to be expected after some time when running from a USB thumb drive. You can reinstall to a fresh USB drive, import your saved configuration (which you hopefully have) and be up and running again in half an hour or so.
If you do not have a saved configuration you can still reinstall to a new drive, import your HDD pool and all your data will be there. But you will have to recreate all configuration manually.
I do not have a configuration, unfortunately, because I just got the thing second hand.
So I guess I’ll have to go through some pain anyway.
So, could you suggest me a (rough) path?
Something like:
Get a new usb drive.
Download some ISO (which one?) and make that USB drive bootable.
Insert the USB drive in the mainboard and boot
Follow instruction
Import pool (I guess this should be possible)
Do some other stuff.
Promise solemnly to study and make things better next time.
I think I also have to evaluate upgrading my hardware…
There is no free SATA port in HP microservers. The architecture is well known. 4 SATA drives, period.
There is another SATA connector for a CD/DVD-ROM, but that one does not support booting.
@flyingn You could of course build a more robust USB drive by combining an M.2 SATA SSD, possibly 2242 instead of 2280 format, with a USB to M.2 enclosure. That will definitely outlast any run off the mill thumb drive.
Hi!
So, I created a flash drive with the ISO and inserted in the mainboard port.
I booted the system and after telling it to install/upgrade, it asks me what disk do I want to boot from, and I see 4 disks. Now I have 4 HDD and I guess it is asking me to install Truenas to (at least) one of them and I guess I won’t be able to use it for data. But the problem is that the pool is currently using all 4 HDDs.
My guess is that I should insert the flash drive in one of the external/chassis usb ports and boot from there (is it possible?) so that when asked where I want Truenas to be installed to I am presented with the 4 HDDs I want to preserve and also the empty flashdrive (or other usb support), so that I can install Truenas there.
Am I right or am I missing something?
Other question You told me that after a fresh install I’ll be able to import the pool. I really do not need to reconstruct the users and their privileges, I am the only user and (supposedly) admin. I just want to be able to extract the data and copy them to a different external disk. Then I can reorganize the whole thing, create a pool from scratch and configure users and stuff. Am I right here? I mean, after importing the pool (I’ll have to know how!) will I be able, as admin to see everything and copy stuff elsewhere before operating in a safe way?
The data drives are connected via a hot swap backplane. There’s a single cable (don’t know which standard from the top of my head) running from the backplane to the MB.
There’s a single SATA cable for the CD/DVD but you will not be able to connect that to the backplane.
Please … this platform is well known. Have you even looked at the docs before making that suggestion? It’s been discussed in this forum for years. It’s a nice small system, really. But you run it like intended or you run something different.
I don’t know the platform unlike yourself, so I asked a question since your earlier post stopped short from explaining why said SATA port was an option.
I have a N40L that I applied a Bios mod to. I’m still using the box as a Truenas backup (replication) Truenas to Truenas. I upgrade my bios in 2015 and has been running strong since. This allows me to use a SSD on the 5th sata port on the motherboard. Two of these servers were available back in the day.
AMD Athlon II Processor Model Neo N36L (1.30 GHz, 15W, 2MB)
AMD Turion II Processor Model Neo N40L (1.50 GHz, 15W, 2MB)
This was applied to my N40L.
I installed my SSD in the vacant CD/DVD bay with an adaptor and a long sata cable to motherboard.
