davep1553

So the 2nd parity check finished with no errors. My double check of the data is progressing albeit something is throttling it (there may be a separate post on that latter) All the drives were old but healthy when the processes started but two have developed smart errors since and I'll be replacing one as soon as the double check is finished (since the old source will provide a replacement drive) Diagnostics attached dvdvault-diagnostics-20210105-1902.zip

The source was a USB enclosure, mounted via terminal to /mnt/usb2. So the cmds were "cp -r /mnt/usb2/somefolder/. /mnt/user/someshare" I still need to go back and fix the file ownership since it made root the owner of everything though.

I'm setting up this system and I just finished loading the first main chunk of data onto it. It was on a 4 disk USB enclosure so I plugged it into the system, mounted it, and used cp commands from the on machine terminal to copy the data to the /mnt/user/whatevershare folder. Doing this unRAID happily distributed the files across the various disks as per my share settings. Now I'm double checking the data (since I'm going to wipe the old drives and repurpose them) and I kicked off a parity sync. The sync is still running but it's past the used point of all but 1 disk and it's found 1231 sync errors. That seams like a lot, I was expecting 0. So I'm definitely going to run a 2nd sync before I wipe these drives but the question is how did it get so high. Could any of these caused it? During the copy a scheduled sync started (set to go on the first of the month) and I canceled it. The goal was copy the data faster and I was going to run a fresh sync after anyway. During the copy a few times I didn't like that it split something up so I used putty and did an mv command to move it from /mnt/disk1 to /mnt/disk2 Another time during the copy I started to do a mv but then changed my mind so I ctrl+c it but it left the partial file it was working on behind so I did an rm on the partial. I have already checked all files were copied from a file name and size perspective, I'm checking contents now but it's going to take a couple days. I'm just concerned about the parity errors and am wondering if doing things from the console might have been at fault. I'll try to remember to kick off a 2nd sync in the morning to see if this happens again.

Ok, so... I was using the USB creator tool and it would not list the drive so I assumed it didn't find what it was looking for. While trying to install on another drive the tool wouldn't work right, while reading up on that I discovered the manual install processes. Decided to try to manual install on the SanDisk. Now something weird happened... I hit cancel on the USB creator but didn't close it. Removed no-brand drive. Inserted the SanDisk and formatted it Fat32 with the UNRAID name (as per the manual install instructions) and the USB creator application suddenly loaded it with all the data?!?! Put it in the server but wouldn't boot. Went back to PC run the make bootable bat file and presto. I have unRAID up and running on my SanDisk.

So I purchased a pair of new SanDisk thumb drives planning to use 1 as the boot drive for my unraid server only to find it doesn't have whatever serial number unraid needs. Agh. I have a cheep no name brand that I'm currently using and want to get off of. Does anybody have any ones they know work and are cheep, trial and error will be annoying and pricy. Perhaps we can turn this into a running list of known to work or not work since I can't find one anyplace. I'm lookin for at most $20 the supper compact form factor and I'm using a USB 3 port so if it is USB 3 would be a bonus. works - Eventually http://amzn.com/B07C4BCH1B - SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB USB3 - Purchased Sept. 28, 2020

So the 2nd drive was able to copy the parity data, it took probably 3 times as long as it would have to calculate the parity data but it did copy. After that I built the data as planed on the former parity disk.

I'm off to bed but thought I'd write a quick update. I'd seen the failure 3 times. I rebooted into safe mode and the replacement drive wouldn't show up. I pulled the drive and tested on a PC and windows wouldn't detect the drive either. Not sure what happened because the drive is still spinning, something must have gone wrong with the PCB, I have another of the same model maybe I'll try a PCB swap latter. Anyway I garbed another 4TB drive I have (this one has SMART failures but it still works for now). No safe mode and the copy is running slower then all get out but it is running. It's at 45% about 5.5 hours in and the RAM usage is down around 13%. I really hope some developer sees this and deals with the very crappy way the software failed for a bad drive. I would still like to know if anybody has had any luck using 3rd party software to copy the parity information to a new disk. I'm thinking I'll try myself soon because I was overall liking everything about unRAID until this last and final test really left a sour taste on it for me.

I'll give safe mode a try but I'm very doubtful since there are no VMs or docker images setup.

I posted what I had in the first post. The crash happens within a few minutes of starting the parity copy, the copy was under 10% when the crash occurred Once it crashes I can't do anything except reboot via power button, but if there is a log somewhere I can grab it. I have now tried it with the system loaded into interface GUI mode. When the crash happened Firefox closed and all mouse functionality stopped so I couldn't check any of the other menus. Are there any 3rd party tools that people have successfully used to clone the parity data to a new disk?

Thank your for the replies. That is a matter of Opinion. I am of the believe that when the raid/array is degraded #1 priority is to get it back to not-degraded ASAP. If you don't fully utilize a drive in that process oh well. Unfortunately I already have that link (it's what I'm attempting) and 1) It is resulting in a system crash 2) The data drives are online and spinning while I'm doing it, therefor they are wearing, therefor they could have a failure. I'm OK with having to copy the parity to the new disk first but 1) I need the system to not crash when doing it and 2) would VASTLY prefer to be able to do it with all the data drive unpowered. P.S. Just letting it run after the crash, the parity data is not copied so either 1) I need a new version of unRAID, 2) a different mechanism in unRAID to copy the parity over or 3) I need software other then unRAID to copy the parity information to the new drive.

Hello All, While I've managed a number of NAS servers over the years I'm currently experimenting with an UnRaid server in preparation for deploying my first. (To make sure I know how to do the common/important things I need to do.) I'm actually testing the final thing, one that I hope to never need to do but if I do want to have done it once before, a disk failed. I'm using the actual MB I plan to use for the system but some old drives I had lying around and all data is just coped from another server so if I loose it oh well. The setup. I installed a totally clean 6.8.3 OS, no plugins or scripts. I built an array from two 500GB drives and a 750 GB drive I had lying around, they have high hours but clear SMART data and to my knowledge are working normally. (The 750 is parity making a 1TB data array) Then loaded it with 700 GB of data. The simulated failure. I shut the system down and unplugged one of the 500 GB drives and installed a 4TB drive (bigger then the parity drive) What I was expecting, and now realize UnRaid can't do (why I play before I deploy), was it would rebuild to the drive but only utilize the first 500 GB (maybe 750 GB) of the drive and the other 3 point something TB would be ignored. I read about the 3 drive swap stuff and I'm trying it. Problem is for some reason the 8GB of RAM in the system fills up before the copy gets to 10% and the system crashes, can't get to anything via web or terminal cmd line (haven't tried terminal GUI yet.) Posting this before I head to bed, I'll let it run overnight see if the copy finishes despite no UI of any kind. 1) The system is crashing Help! Feels like some sort of memory leak, I watched the system RAM usage creap up to 100% then got a bunch of errors similar to this in the web interface. (Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 2097152) (tried to allocate 53248 bytes) in /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/dynamix/include/Markdown.php on line 1995) 2) Is it possible to copy the parity data over to the new drive with all the other drives being powered down? If this were to happen for real I would rather the other drives sit there with no power while the copy is done so they have little to no chance of also failing while I first have to just copy the parity over to a new larger drive? FYI: This is simulating a real scenario that happened to me once. Replacing the failed drive with a same size one was not possible so I had to go bigger, in that system it did what I expected and ignored the additional space until after slowly installing a larger drive at a time and rebuilding they were all updated then the space became available. I was hoping UnRaid would behave the same but expose the data once the Parity disks were updated. But first priority has to be getting back to a healthy (if under utilized) array ASAP because ya never know when a 2nd/3rd failure might occur.