Hey all. Hopefully I’m not beyond help, and I know I’m asking a lot. Here’s my situation. Around 12 years ago I built a FreeNAS system. It was set up in Raid 1 using two 1TB WD Red drives. There was a third WD Red 1TB drive in there - for installation and config files, I believe. I don’t remember the version of FreeNAS I was running, but it was the flavor where you always boot and run from a USB drive. Several years ago I powered down the system - I don’t exactly recall why - but the boot USB disappeared. Here’s where things get tough for me. A couple years ago I developed a condition which affects my memory and cognition, and I’m having a heck of a time remembering much about this system, other than I know it was Raid1, and it has all of my daughter’s childhood pics and videos from birth to around age 6-7 on it.
Also a couple of years ago I purchased hardware to build my daughter an overpowered Minecraft rig, which would also serve as a storage target on my home network. I got Linux Mint installed, then the condition started hitting, and the hardware sat. Now I’m putting together the system as a TrueNAS build, just to try to recover the data and get it onto my Google Drive (plz don’t ban for mentioning) as a worst-case backup. Here’s what I’ve got.
MSI B550-A PRO
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB
Samsung - 970 EVO Plus 1TB Internal SSD PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe
Radeon rx570 graphics card
4x 4TB WD Red Plus
I also have all three drives, removed from the original NAS.
Here’s where things stand now: I’ve got the system built (except the graphics card). I flashed the iso of TrueNAS-SCALE-25.04.2.5 onto a new USB drive, booted from there, and installed to the NVMe drive. My hope from what I’ve read was that I could get the installation done, then connect the drives, and import the pool. Alas, life is not so easy.
The first time the system came online after that initial reboot, I got the console setup menu that provides the system IP address. I connected from a laptop, confirmed I could log in, then powered the system down so I could connect the three drives. When I powered it back on, I did not get the console setup menu, but could still access the system from the web interface. Unfortunately, the web interface does not see the WD drives at all - only the NVMe drive where the system is installed.
I rebooted and went to bios and confirmed that the bios sees the drives. What’s got me worried is all drives - including the nvme - show in the bios as “new” with basically full capacity remaining, only a few hundred MB used. This could be right for the nvme, I actually have no idea how big TrueNAS is, but the ISO was a couple gigs so I figured it would be at least that. I didn’t do anything that should reformat the disks. I’m hoping it’s just that the bios doesn’t understand the zfs partitioning.
So, right now I’m stuck. I don’t want to go down the path of hiring a data recovery company if this is something I can troubleshoot my way through. I’ll provide any and all information I can, if there are any kind people willing to sort of hold my hand through this.