Troubleshooting Failed to Import Pools after Upgrade

TrueNAS General
1

I have been here before! After upgrading from 25.04.2.6 to 25.10.2.1 I worked through the resolution of deleting 25.10.2.1 boot environment, re-applying the upgrade and I thought that worked. However when I decided to upgrade to 25.10.2.1-1 I found that I was back on 25.04.2.6. Evidently I had not not set the active boot pool (environment?) correctly and had rebooted back to 25.04. Just to be safe, I removed 25.10.2, re-applied the 25.10.2 update, rebooted OK, made sure the active boot pool was 25.10.2.

I then applied the 25.10.2.1 and that failed with the error

Begin: Importing ZFS root pool ‘boot-pool’ … Begin: importing pool ‘boot-pool’ using defaults Failure:1”
Command: /sbin/zpool import -N -f ‘boot-pool’
Message: cannot import ‘boot-pool’: no such pool available Error: 1
Failed to import pool ‘boot-pool’|
Manually import the pool and exit.

Now I am unable to boot to 25.10.2 (no boot-pool found) and am back to 25.04.

In trying to go through the documentation, none of the commands I am reading of are working for me.

From the CLI doing a sudo zpool import I get ‘no pools available to import’ once I rebooted back to 25.04.2.6.

From the dashboard when I got o Storage → Import Pool → nothing is listed in the drop-down

I deleted all my backup boot environment (20), just keeping 25.10.2.1 and 25.04.2.6; performed a scrub on the boot pool. Still unable to boot to 25.10.2.1 from 25.04.2.6

Boot Pool Condition: Online
Size 220 GiB
Used 6.1 GiB

Boot Pool Status:
Boot-pool nvme0n1p3 no errors

I am obviously missing something. When I use the boot cli how do I refer to the boot-pool to select it for a manual update? Is it the boot environment name?

Of course, thanks in advance! And I appreciate your patience. I am actually usually pretty good about figuring this stuff out. Just tired of going in circles ;-).

2

Go into the BIOS and check to see how many entries are in boot list. You may have to prune a few from UEFI. That is a guess

3

Thanks @SmallBarky . It’s been years since I had to mess around in the bios. I only see 1 entry, and that is for the boot drive; unless I am missing something. Looks clean to me.

boot-1
boot-1640×480 103 KB

boot-2
boot-2640×480 115 KB

4

Not sure why you get that message. BUT, you never manually import the “boot-pool”, as that contains the OS.

This indicates that the error was “stupid”. You have imported the boot-pool.

If everything works, you can stop messing around with updates and we can concentrate on why the error occurs.

5

Hi @Arwen . Regardless of whether the error was ‘stupid’, fortunately I have been able to roll back to 25.04.2.6. Sooner or later I would like to upgrade to the current Truenas version. I was certainly confused when the upgrade instructed me to manually import the pool and exit and what I found searching seemed to lead me down a rabbit hole. It’s a pretty clean install.

image
image1099×295 15.9 KB

6

Are you saying any attempt to go beyond your 25.04.2.6, ends up with a failed boot?
With that error message?

7

Yes. Exactly!

8

Sorry, that is so bizarre that I don’t have an idea why.

The only thing I can suggest, is:

  1. Get a USB flash drive, (for testing only)
  2. Backup your configuration
  3. Install the newer version to that USB flash drive
  4. Boot to the USB flash drive, (probably using the BIOS to select boot device)
  5. If it boots cleanly, then restore the backed up configuration. This will probably require a reboot, so be prepared to again use BIOS to select this USB flash drive

If everything is good, I guess you could Mirror your USB flash drive to the existing boot-pool. Then remove the USB flash drive from the Mirror. But, that would of course over-write the existing boot environments.

Or you could use a better quality new boot device, leaving your existing boot pool alone.

9

Thanks @Arwen . I’ll try the USB option first.

10

Thanks again @Arwen . I did a fresh install of 25 onto the boot drive successfully. Now finishing up the SMB and iDrive configurations etc.