I did a thing*

"boredalways" (boredalway666) 08/08/2020 at 22:33 • Filed to: computerlopnik, I did a thing, FreeNAS, Fuck Me, Fuck, I DONT KNOW WHAT IM DOING

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*and may have fucked up

Decided I wanted to try my hand at building a NAS out of old computer parts and hard drives I have laying around. How hard can it be ?

It took a day and a half!!!, but that was due to a few hiccups (on/off switch died on tower case and had to switch to a HTPC case, iso burns to USB kept having crash errors).

Once I figured out that the I needed an older version of Rufus, everything worked and the install was without issue.

Tah Dah!!!

Can’t wait to get Plex running on it and...wait a sec...

...the SSD at the top has the OS. It’s the one that would get completely wiped of data during the install.

And the 4tb of music, movies, TV shows, and animation on the 2 HDDs at the bottom will be fine even though they were connected at the time of the OS install to the SSD , right?

Right?

RIGHT?!?!?!

...not sure, but I think I may have deleted 12 years worth of entertainment.

If so, I’ll live — the vast majority of it can be streamed from the web.

(...I blame Kinja.)

ItalianJobR53 - now with added 'MERICA and unreliability > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 22:41

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That sucks....

I disconnect other drives before formatting  coz I know im dumb enough to hit format on the wrong drive...

boredalways > ItalianJobR53 - now with added 'MERICA and unreliability 08/08/2020 at 22:47

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Same, but I was stressed out from having to build and rebuild the PC several times over until I noticed the switch being bad. Plus I only had the SSD attached during multiple failed attempts installing the OS. I don’t remember when I connected the 2 other drives and completely forgot to triple check when I finally got the install to work.

Live and learn.

For Sweden > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 22:47

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It’s time to call in the big techs

SmugAardvark > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 22:49

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I considered doing this awhile back, since I have a few old PC towers stacked in the garage. Then I realized that most of those computers draw quite a bit more power than is probably necessary just for running a Plex server, while not having the specs to stream x265 files without stuttering.

I ended up “splurging” on a Synology DS218+. It can transcode x265 mp4 files, although it apparently struggles doing so if they are UHD. Doesn’t bother me, because pretty much everything I run through it is 1080p at a maximum.

PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 22:50

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Sucks, sorry... .I’ve been in a similar situation and recreating a media library like that is no fun and time consuming. The very dim silver lining is thatl likely you’ll end up clearing out stuff you didn’t really need.

That said, if you did end up formatting over stuff you want back, there are applications that can be run on a formatted drive to recover data  but I haven’t had great luck with them, just passing success.

ItalianJobR53 - now with added 'MERICA and unreliability > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 22:58

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Aww man, that sucks big time... nothing like struggling to do something, do it and then realize u did a silly mistake somewhere

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 23:09

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The files on the other two drives shouldn’t have been touched if you had specifically said install the OS to ‘such and such’ disk, if ‘such and such’ disk was the SSD...?

boredalways > PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 08/08/2020 at 23:22

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What's that program called?

boredalways > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 08/08/2020 at 23:24

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I'll check again tomorrow

PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 > boredalways 08/08/2020 at 23:59

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I dug around and can't for the life of me remember or find the software used.  

boredalways > PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 08/09/2020 at 00:05

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Bummer.  Thanks for checking.

tpw_rules > boredalways 08/09/2020 at 10:54

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PhotoRec is a good program for these situations as it’s specifically designed to search for and recover media files independent of filesystem structure. There’s also similar things like Recuva or filesystem recovery tools like TestDisk. Reformatting a disk does not write all that much data to it so you should be able to recover 99% of your files.

For those programs, you’ll need to have another drive to copy the recovered data to. They won’t write anything to the disk you’re trying to recover from as this could further damage the information. FreeNAS works best when you format your storage drives as ZFS, so copying everything off and back on is probably a good move anyway, even if the disks are totally fine.

Finally, this is why I make it a habit to unplug drives I don’t want to install the OS to when I’m installing an OS (or doing similar potentially catastrophic disk tasks like running a filesystem resizer).

EDIT: FreeNAS won’t mount non-ZFS drives anyway so you will have to (if you haven’t by accident already) reformat everything anyway. Your disks might show up in the import function but you won’t have anywhere to copy the data to until you format :

https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.3-U4/storage.html#importing-a-disk

boredalways > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 08/10/2020 at 14:50

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Ooops, I don't have a working rig to use for testing right now until I get a replacement switch later in the week.

boredalways > tpw_rules 08/10/2020 at 14:52

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Thanks for the info.  Will give it a try latter in the week once I get some more equipment.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > boredalways 08/10/2020 at 16:22

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Hopefully you can at least get stuff back!