What happens if boot drive dies

[AJV]

If my SSD stops working what happens to the OS? Since is not included in the RAID would my data be wiped?

[Dylan]

There are levels of dead when it comes to drives. If it's dead-dead, as in no response to any condition (like plugging it into another machine or use an external  powered USB/SATA reader), then unless you've backed it up, your data is gone. However, you may be able to boot from an thumb-drive with something like Dr Parted to see if you can recover from whatever condition or error the drive is suffering from. 

Moral of the story = backup your boot disk to an external source.

[arvinpw]

in the TrueNAS, you could juat import the existing pool, and your data still intach..

But as right now in beta, HexOS ignores all of existing pool and data and treat it as a new drives and wipes everything. Lets hope the developers acknowledge this and let us import the existing pool.

[AJV]

Got it, I wanted to use an older 128GB SSD to not waste my larger ones but looks like is better if I use the more reliable larger ones

[Mascot]

On 12/6/2024 at 3:58 PM, arvinpw said:

But as right now in beta, HexOS ignores all of existing pool and data and treat it as a new drives and wipes everything.

I did a search that lead here because I was wondering if there was a need, and if so a convenient way, to export/backup extra configurations like file shares and such in case of boot drive failure. I figured that it might be automatically backed up to the pool, so that when you reinstalled on a fresh boot drive and imported the pool, it would just ask if you wanted to import the configuration from it and it would be as if nothing ever happened. It didn't even cross my mind that recovering from a boot drive failure at all would not be considered basic functionality.

Leaving that aside, does this mean that someone in this situation could start installing HexOS, but bypass and log into TrueNAS directly and recover the pool that way? I don't mean in the sense that you could then continue in HexOS, necessarily, but that you could at least get a file share or something started in TrueNAS so that you could extract the data. Or is there a way to create and download a boot drive backup via the HexOS interface, perhaps? Because if the only way to make the system recoverable from both types of drive failure, is to regularly boot from another boot device in order to image the boot drive, that's... exactly the kind of jank I really want to avoid having to deal with.

[PsychoWards]

At least for Truenas, you can backup your config and store it wherever you like. In the case of a boot drive failure, you would just reinstall truenas, reimport the config and you are good to go, no need to do an image of the boot drive itself.

This will not work with hexos, since hexos will create new pools and wipe the drives. But using Truenas instead would be an option to recover the data from the drives until importing pools is possible in hexos.

[lefevresart]

On 12/11/2024 at 4:14 PM, PsychoWards said:

"...since hexos will create new pools and wipe the drives...."

New to all of this and thought about all the redundancy for the data drives but hadn't even considered the boot drive failure. Would a viable work-around for the boot failing be to pull the data drives and copy all my data using another pc and/or SSD enclosure? Or is the data setup in a way that its ONLY accessible via hexos/boot drive? Do the data drives not act like regular drives outside of the NAS? 

[PsychoWards]

Normally, the boot drive dying isn't an issue (except for the fact that you have to buy a new drive) as long as you have a backup off your settings. You would just reinstall the OS, import the backup and you are good to go.

However since Hexos is still in Beta, this is currently not possible, there is no option to skip the pool creation during setup. This will come in the future but it is not there yet. Until then, if your boot drive stops working, your are going to install truenas directly and import the pools (the pool information is stored on the drives, which means you can directly read it from them) this way you can still access your data, however you have lost the Hexos part and can only switch back to Hexos once it supports pool import.

Since the data drives using ZFS you have to read them as such, you cannot just mount them individually and try to get data from them. But as I said a boot drive dying will not result in data loss, you would only need to switch to truenas for the time being.

[Mascot]

Also worth mentioning is that during HexOS installation, I noticed you can checkbox multiple drives for installation. I assume this creates a mirror pool of boot drives, thus giving you redundancy. After installation, it looks like you can add a second drive to the boot pool in TrueNAS (which is what I'll have to try, since I did not have an extra nvme when I first installed and I can't be bothered to reinstall at this point unless I really have to).

[PsychoWards]

On 12/30/2024 at 10:04 PM, Mascot said:

Also worth mentioning is that during HexOS installation, I noticed you can checkbox multiple drives for installation. I assume this creates a mirror pool of boot drives, thus giving you redundancy.

Can confirm, that's what I did and I have mirrored boot drives working flawlessly.

[dinecoj]

If you missed that option (like me 😬) during your install you can also do it after the fact

 

 

[ubergeek]

If you really wanna take the deep dive you can look into UrBackup . I use it for all my computers here at home and at work. Atm it is all going to a off site locations with 1g/1g connection.  

[markrieder]

On 2. 1. 2025 at 17:39, PsychoWards said:

Môžem potvrdiť, že som to urobil a zrkadlené bootovacie disky fungujú bezchybne.

So if I use 2 x nvme when installing Hex and mark both, the system automatically creates a backup of the boot drive? And if my boot unit dies, can I restore it from the second nvme? That would be great news.

[dinecoj]

Yes you can select both and then both drives will be used for the boot pool. I don't know exactly how it works, but if your first boot drive dies you should be able to boot from your second drive and get back into operation

[PsychoWards]

It's not a backup, it's a mirror, meaning everything is stored on both drives at the same time and any change is written to both drives, there is never a delta between both drives.

Meaning there is not a first/second drive, it's on both and any one drive can die (or unplug for that matter) and accept Truenas shouting vary angrily at you that 1 drive is missing, everything is still working as if nothing ever happened.

You don't even need to do anything at this point, Truenas is handling everything automagically. Once you got a new replacement drive, you put it in, setup the mirror in Truenas/Hexos again and you got full redundancy again.

[dinecoj]

2 hours ago, PsychoWards said:

Meaning there is not a first/second drive

While that my be true in the mirror, one of the two boot partitions are being actively booted into, while the other is further down the order - that's what I meant by first/second

[Dylan]

Don't forget to image you OS installation media - redundancy saves blood pressure (at least at my age 🙃)