I lost most of what I own in the recent flooding in South Carolina. Among the losses was my TrueNAS. The drives are OK, but the unit was lost. I got it to a tech repair place in two days. The tech opened it, looked inside and said, “No… yeah, no that’s just never going to work again”. The drives were tested, and found to have no issues.
I now have a new TrueNAS enclosure. What is involved in getting the original drives to work in the new unit?
If you saved a backup of your config file before the system loss, all you need to do is install TrueNAS on your new machine, then go to:
System > General Settings > Manage Configuration (the button in the upper-right corner) > Upload File
If you don’t have your config file, you can click “Import Pool” (DO NOT CREATE A NEW POOL) from the Storage Dashboard to get your data back, but you will have to recreate and your users and ACLs and things like that.
I have the M.2 drive from the original, can I get the file I need from that?
I mean if the boot drive still works and still has TrueNAS Scale installed on it, boot it up and see before you do anything else?
EDIT: Yeah, I just found this post Migrate TrueNAS Scale to a new system/install? | TrueNAS Community, which also echoes what HoneyBadger said below.
You might need to reconfigure your network settings, but if you fire up your new build with the original boot device and data drives, it should act much the same as if you installed a new motherboard.
Glad to hear you and your data are safe from the flooding!
How on earth? 
To add to what others said, the worst-case scenario is you don’t have a config file to import.
This means you have to reconfigure your shares, services, and so forth. Inconvenient, but can be dealt with.
But what’s most important is the integrity of your pool, and the data within.
If you do get the system up and the data back online, I would seriously recommend making sure you have a backup.
The drives may be working now, but latent humidity damage is quite common, and can vastly shorten the lifespan of devices like motherboards and HDs.
Where can I find “import pool”. I looked under pools and only saw add.
That’s how you import a pool.
I seem to have the pool back now, but there is still an issue. I try to add a user account for myself, which seems to work. Then I try to connect from my Windows 11 PC and it says the connection is refused. I also tried logging into the website for my TrueNAS as the new name, and it failed. Any ideas on next steps?
I added an SMB share to it. It seems to get further now, but it still will not recognize any kind of login (root or user)
You can only log in to the TruieNAS GUI with the admin account and its password.
The W!! failure needs more background information to diagnose
I am able to log into the web GUI.
Platform: TRUENAS-MINI-3.0-X+
Version: TrueNAS-13.0-U3.1
CPU: Intel(R) Atom™ CPU C3758 @ 2.20GHz
Memory: # 31.9GiB
total available (ECC)
Free: 27.6 GiB
ZFS Cache: 1.1 GiB
Services: 3.2 GiB
Storage: 2 3.64 TB drives
I hope that helps. If you need more information, I will need to know where to get it, as I am new to this.
I am unable to connect from Windows using the user ID and password I created for that purpose
I was able to get it working. I specifically added a permission set for the specific user. I am not certain if this was needed, or not, as I also discovered that the user name I was using was similar, but not the same, to what was actually needed. I have ordered two 4TB SSDs to back up the current files to as well. Thank you everyone for the help!
