Here's the situation...
A few weeks ago, one my my Seagate 3TB disks ( Disk 8 ) started reporting a lot of read errors. Having run across this before, and done some research, I knew it wasn't an uncommon problem for these particular drives to have, especially when used in an unraid array. I had a spare drive (unfortunately, it was the exact same type of 3TB seagate), so I popped it in and ran one cycle of the preclear_disk script on it. Unfortunately, I has also recently noticed that I was having difficulty writing to the array, saying I had no write permissions, which led me to believe at least one other drive was being mounted in read-only mode due to file system errors, so I ran reiserfsck on the other drives while preclearing the new drive. Sure enough, my disk 7 (which was a Hitachi 3TB drive) reported that I needed to rebuilt the FS tree... so, not thinking about the fact that I would soon need to do a data rebuild from parity, I went ahead and started the process.
As soon as I saw the first tree correction being written to the disk, I realized what I had done - basically I'd invalidated my parity information. Sure enough, once the preclear of the new disk finished and I started a data rebuild, I got a "remaining time" estimate of a little over 60 days. Normally that's pretty standard during the first few minutes of a data rebuild, but typically it drops down to 20 hours or less once it's been going a while. Not this time. In addition, I heard frequent double beeps during the process, which I believe was the "parity error" beep pattern.
So, I stopped the rebuild. Since the old, failed drive hadn't actually died yet, I figured that I could skip the whole data rebuild process and just hook that drive up to another PC (or just not assign it to the array on my unraid box) and then copy all of its contents over to the new Disk 8, tell unraid to trust the array, do a parity check, and all would be fine. Am I on the right track? If not, is there any alternative? If so, what exact steps do I need to take to trust the array in the New unraid 5.0, as the wiki page seems to indicate that the old process won't work anymore.