USB boot stick has gone bad, can't boot

[palmito]

Entirely my fault, as I have not looked for errors in the GUI for a while, busy moving and retiring!

Is the process described in this forum topic still up to date:

USB Stick going bad. How to reinstall but keep data?

Hello. I believe my USB stick is starting to go bad, so I want to reinstall onto a new USB stick. My question is, what do I need to “backup” in order to come back up with minimal loss of configurations. Currently I have 3 Rockons installed, a few scheduled scrubs/snapshots, NFS shares, Samba shares, AFP Shares, and a handful of Users created. Also, I have two BTRFS pools. And I obviously don’t want to loose those Is it as simple as taking a config backup, then popping in a new…

Just wanted to verify since it’s from 2018. Also just want to verify that this applies to my case, I’m not that versed in Rockstor…

Thanks in advance for any help.

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@palmito Hello again. Long time no see.

That post is way old but has some still relevant stuff in it. Mainly taking care not to overwrite a data drive by accident and the like. But given you are going to have to re-install you should definitely do this using our new v4.1.0-0 installer downloadable from there:

https://rockstor.com/dls.html

Take a look first at out step-by-step how-to on this new installer here:

https://rockstor.com/docs/installation/installer-howto.html

Pool import works exactly the same, as does most stuff actually so it will look and work pretty much as you are used to it working.

You may also want to take a look at our new Minimum System Requirements doc section here:

https://rockstor.com/docs/installation/quickstart.html#minimum-system-requirements

The most important thing is to make sure you don’t install by accident over a prior data drive. To ensure this we recommend disconnecting them with the system powered off. That way it’s impossible to install on them. And don’t leave the old system disk in place. Rockstor gets confused if there is more than one copy of it’s install in place at any one time.

So basically:

• Do a fresh install of v4 using our installer to a new system disk when that disk is the only one connected to the system (to remove risk of data overwrite).
• Then when the install has finished and you have finished the setup via the Web-UI, as per the how-to. Reboot to prove the resulting install is working over a reboot.
• Then shutdown via the Web-UI and re-attach all the old data drives.
• You can then import the new pool and do a fresh setup. Unless of course you have a config backup file. But you don’t mention this.

Hope that helps and do ask here if I’ve missed something. The new installer is way quicker and smaller so it shouldn’t take much time to try it out. We no longer release updates for our older CentOS based v3 and our v4 is now “Built on openSUSE” so we have active upstream btrfs improvements coming all the time. One of the main reasons we moved to openSUSE as it goes.

The one problem you may have is if you created any shares on your old system disk. As if it’s gone bad and you didn’t back them up then they are lost to the old bad system disk. Thought this depends on how bad it is of course. But given you are to use a new system disk and need to re-install anyway we can cross that bridge if it’s required. Generally the Web-UI discourages folks from doing this with a warning banner across the to. Also the new system Pool is now called “ROOT” not the older name of “rockstor_rockstor”.

[palmito]

HI! Had not logged in because I have been running the system trouble free for a long time!!!

Installed the new system, have not connected the data drives, so have not tried the pool import yet.

I do have a backup from my last system change in March 2021. Do I restore from the backup file first and then do the pool import?

Thanks for all you help so far.

[palmito]

Forgot that it was outlined in the original 2018 post I quoted, import the pool then load config. Just want to verify this is still correct!

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@palmito Hello again.
Re:

… import the pool then load config.

Correct. This is required as some of the config-backup elements depend on shares, and so will fail to restore some of their elements if the associated shares have not been imported (via the pool import which brings in shares, snapshots, & clones).

Also note that older config save didn’t includes some elements that have since been added, like Rock-ons; and so they will not be restored. But if you install fresh ones, if you used any, and pick the exact same shares they used before, each should pick-up where they left off.

By the way, pool import is done vai the disk overview page and we have it documented here:
https://rockstor.com/docs/interface/storage/disks.html#import-btrfs-pool

Hope that helps and well done on getting the new install done. Do you have any feedback on our how-to for this: https://rockstor.com/docs/installation/installer-howto.html

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@palmito Hello again.

As a result of this thread and your recent question re order of config restore / pool import I’ve finnally gotten around to creating the following issue:

Add text on config restore re pool import dependency

Once that is resolved the Web-UI itself should, as it should, afford this behavioural ordering .

I don’t want to include the import into the config restore as that would overload the elements of a system too much; and likely be way more confusing and ultimately less robust/flexible. So this way we keep them separated but indicate the one way dependency.

Thanks for helping to prompt this overdue issue.

[palmito]

Just finished importing the pools and restoring my config. Everything worked fine and the system is up and running again. No loss of data, just loss of face for not looking at the system messages telling me the USB stick was going bad…

The new install went smoothly, no issues. The install write up at https://rockstor.com/docs/installation/installer-howto.html was clear and easy to follow.

Thank you so much for the hand holding during the reinstall. And thanks even more for the quick responses to my questions. So to summarize, the support was excellent and fast!

[palmito]

Even though you are thanking me it occurred to you. You should thank yourself! It didn’t occur to me to suggest that, but it is a good idea. Thanks for opening the ticket for this action, it will definitely benefit anyone who needs to reinstall and it will save you from getting emails asking the same questions from people who don’t read instructions completely like me…

Again, thanks for the great support!