need help with NAS4Free system booting

[xXaNaXx]

so i've had my NAS4Free system up and running ZFS with 5 drives plus a USB stick boot drive for over a year now without much of any issues. last night apparently the power went out, and now the NAS4free system will only get me up to a "mountroot>" prompt.

from what i've been able to glean online (NAS4Free site is offline right now, so i can't check their forums), it's not finding the root drive...it goes through the BSD bootloader and gives me the options like "1) Mount NAS4Free in Normal Mode", etc., etc., but it will never actually boot into NAS4Free.

when i type in "?" i get the following:

List of GEOM managed disk devices:
ufsid/535da44e4d1726a4 ada4 ada3 ada2 ada1 ada0 da0a da0

then it goes back to "mountroot>"

up at the very top, i can see a line that says:
ada4: Previously was known as ad20

but i can't scroll up higher to see anything above that, and it all goes by too fast for me to read it. i'm not sure how to go about seeing if the root even still exists on the USB stick or not.

does anyone know how i can go about getting this machine back online?

 

[Fifth Horseman]

I use FreeNAS but I believe NAS4Free works very similarly.

To me it sounds like the USB drive is shot (more specifically the configuration is corrupted). What I would try is to install N4F on another USB stick, boot with it, and then restore a backup copy of the config. If you don't have a backup copy of the config file, you should be able to just import the volume (it may pick it up automatically), but you'll have to redo everything else like network settings, security, etc.

 

[xXaNaXx]

yeah, for a bit, i forgot that i had created a 2nd N4F installation on an identical USB stick, so i was able to load that up and get it accessible over the webgui, then i was able to restore my configuration from a backup i made a while back. i may be missing a few settings like some services running & whatnot, but at least it's accessible again and all my data appears to be there.

i powered it down and i'm creating a .bin image of the good USB stick now with ImageUSB (which is taking FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRR...2.5 hrs and it's only 50% completed out of 8GB, WTF?!?!), then i'll try writing that to the original USB stick again and see if it works.