Drives are not showing back up, and any help is greatly appreciated.
First and foremost, thank you so much to everyone who spends any time helping me with this. I'm kind of getting to that freaking out stage and just hoping there is something small I am overlooking.
TL;DR
I plugged my "old" shucked WD white label drives into my Corsair RM650 using a SilverStone 4-way SATA power splitter during a server upgrade, and now they are not showing back up in unRAID or in the motherboard IPMI screen. If I use a USB-to-SATA, one of the 14TB white label WD drive shows up under unassigned devices as "VirtualDisk_E12027XXXXXXXXXX" with a size of "0 B." what can I do to bring them back, or how bad is it?
In detail
I have two identically spec'd unRAID servers (4 drives in each – 2 parity drives, 2 data drives – all 14TB WD white-label shucked drives), one server I keep at my house and one that stays at my brother's house (portrayed in the green block in the diagram). They occasionally get backed up to a USB hard drive that stays in a safe, but everyone knows how well/consistent that goes.
So, it was time (after some saving up) to upgrade the FIRST system and add two more shucked WD hard drives to each system, so the 2 unRAID servers could start cross backing up to each other on a schedule. So, I added two more shucked WD White label drives to the first system, bringing the total number of drives in the system to 6 (2 parity, 2 data, 2 data to backup remote server).
The case just so happens to be a Fractal Design Node 804, which has 2 drive cages that each hold 4 drives. The "problem" (in jest) is that the Corsair RM650 power supply in the system has two SATA power cables that only have 3 SATA power plugs each.
So, being the novice that I feel like now, I put my 4 original drives in one drive cage and took a 4-way SilverStone SATA power cable from my brother's computer (this is where I think I may have made a fatal mistake) to power the four "old" drives in the first cage, and then I could use the Corsair 3-way SATA power cable to power my 2 new drives with an extra SATA power for future expansion (portrayed in the red block on the diagram). I powered on the system, the systems POSTs, the fans run for about 2 seconds, and the system shuts back down. I flipped the switch on the power supply, checked all my connections in the system, turned the system on again, and tried again to get the same result.
I took a break, and after coming back a few hours later, I tried just hooking up 3 drives to the system using one of the Corsair 3-way power cables (1 "old" drive and the 2 new drives). I boot up the server, and the 2 new drives show up, but the 1 "old" drive does not (verified in the IPMI of the motherboard and unRAID). So, I unplug that SATA power cable (system powered down, and up, etc.), and plug in my other Corsair 3-way power cable with the other 3 "old" drives, turn the system on again, and none of those “old” drives come up (verified in the IPMI and unRAID).
Freaking out now, I take my USB-to-SATA adapter (NOT the custom-made PCB from the shucked enclosures) and plugin one of the "old" drives to my Windows 10 computer (to eliminate all the variables of the unRAID computer) just to see if I've completely killed that drive. In windows disk management, the drive comes up, and windows ask if I want to boot the drive in MBR or GPT. Not wanting to harm the data on the drive, I eject it from my Windows computer. So, I verified the drive is not dead. So, I plugged the drive in (via the same USB) to my unRAID machine, and instead of coming up as "WDC_WD140XXXX-S/NxS/NxS/N" the 14TB hard drive showed up under unassigned devices as "VirtualDisk_E12027XXXXXXXXXX" with a size of "0 B."
Question:
So, the question I am trying to get to is: what happened to these drives, at what point did I mess up, and most importantly, does anyone think the data is recoverable from these drives?
In conclusion:
I'm sorry this post was so long-winded. I normally feel knowledgeable enough about computers, but I may be looking at data loss on this one, and I want to make sure I don't leave out any details in the process. Again, thank you to anyone who can help me. I greatly appreciate any help.