Hi everyone ! first of all i’m french so sorry for my english.
Yesterday I was about to make the last update of truenas scale and sadly it doesn’t boot anymore. I think my SSD where was the OS installed is dead.
In my set up I have two ssd (one for the OS and the other was for the ix-application folder. And I have two 4To hdds
And of course I haven’t made a backup like a *******…
So my question is, can I reinstall Truenas SCALE, without losing all of my datas ? It’s not a problem if I have to reinstall and reconfigure everything, I just don’t want to lose my files…
Thanks for your answer in advance, i’m not a pro please be gentle
That’s the beauty of truenas, your data is completely separate from the boot disks. Even if it fails your data is safe. If you’re afraid of installing truenas to the wrong disks, you can disconnect your data disks, install truenas on the new boot disks, shut the nas down, reconnect your data disks and re-import the pools from the truenas gui.
Only problem is, if you don’t have a backup of the config, you have to manually reconfigure shares and users etc.
After the installation finished, you’ve reconnected the data disks and started the nas again, you login to the webui and under storage there’s an option to either create a new pool or import an existing one - DO NOT create a new pool, but instead click on import pool, it should show you all importable pools. You choose the pool, klick import and that’s it. Depending on the size of the pool it could take a while.
Now that it’s clear that the answer is “yes”, it might be useful to understand what went wrong.
Was it a manual update, or one triggered from the GUI? What exactly have you done?
What makes you think that the boot drive is dead? (Rather than GRUB having lost its marbles, which is not unheard of…)
What happens on boot (or on non-boot)? What’s the error message in the console?
2 days ago I had a proposition to make an update to the last firware has usual. Just click on “dowload & install” and I don’t know why this time i didn’t check the box “save your configuration”
The download and the install seemed fine till the reboot. Since then no possibilities to access to the webpage.
To be honest I didn’t have the time yet to access to the boot screen maybe i can start with that once i’ll be home again.
And the things make me think that the drive is “dead” is that since a month I had several messages telling that i had errors on one of my ssd where the apps are installed and that de drive was “degraded”
At first my install was : 1 ssd for the OS + 1 ssd for cache + 2 HDD for data
I read that the ssd for cache was useless so i decided to move my ix application folder to this ssd instead of the cache
Automatic update (from which version to which version?) rules out installing on a wrong drive.
Issues with the app pool is not indicative of a dead boot drive. But loosing one SSD could have reset drive numbering and confused GRUB.
Or networking could have been reset.
Do check the console—by IPMI or by plugging in a monitor. You’ll need a console to reinstall anyway.
8 TB of data from two 4 TB drives? If this is a stripe rather than a (redundant) mirror, you ARE on course to eventually loose all your data—just wait for one of the drives to have an issue.
Indeed… that’s why i was planning to remove one of the ssd previously put for cache (then for the ix-application folder), and replace it by a HDD to do a RAID
By the way can I move the Ix-application folder on the ssd where the OS is or is it closed once the installation done ?
Mind that there’s no direct way to change from stripe/mirror to raidz. It’s all:
Replicate (implying having two full pools); or
Backup, destroy and restore.
You could, however, add two drives to turn your two single-drives vdevs into two 2-way mirrors
This is what makes the boot drive disposable, and allows to reinstall without losing data…
It is possible, but fully unsupported, to hack your way to install on a partition, and then use another partition on the same drive for another purpose. Replacing drives then requires using the same trickery…
You have not described your hardware, so we do not know what’s what, what’s where, and what could be your options (PCIe slots, including x1? M.2?).
SSDs are typically well suited to fast random I/O, as fits applications, but you can move ix-applications to your storage pool—especially if it is a stripe of mirrors.
Ha! We have an explicit use case. Typically, this would lead to a raidz(2) HDD pool for storing the media itself, and NVMe drives for boot and apps to keep all SATA ports for the bulk storage.
?
rather than a (redundant) mirror, you ARE on course to eventually loose all your data—just wait for one of the drives to have an issue.