johngalt

https://wiki.unraid.net/index.php/File_System_Conversion

It's in the wiki for the file system conversion: "Share based, no inclusions, preserving parity Note: only for systems with no share inclusions and exclusions, that is, all shares are allowed to use all data drives Use rsync or unBALANCE or MC to save all of the data on a ReiserFS drive to the other data drives; then format it with XFS, and repeat on another data drive, continuing until all drives are converted Advantages: simpler to understand, no drive swapping Disadvantages: some planning and space management needed; small shares may be scattered across the drives; some data may be moved multiple times, slowing down the overall speed; normal system operation is possible"

It's been a bumpy road but I now have three new 18TB drives in my server and am ready to start the conversion from ReiserFS to XFS. I currently have (7) 6TB, (5) 10TB, and (2) 18TB drives, plus an 18TB parity drive. The two 18TB drives are already XFS and I have 27TB of free space for moving files around. I've read through this thread and the wiki for the process. I was planning on using unBalance to move the files from disc to disc. I just had a question about the following: "small shares may be scattered across the drives; some data may be moved multiple times". Is this anything I need to worry about? If something gets moves multiple times, what do I look for? I was also thinking about just mapping each drive in windows and using File Explorer to move the files from one drive to another and was wondering what the downside and risk would be with this method?

Hmmm, can't start the array with the 6TB drive now that there's been an 18TB in its place. "The replacement disk must be as big or bigger than the original". I can think of two options at this point, but I'm obviously an amateur when it comes to this: 1) Use unbalance to move the data off the 18tb drive and onto another drive in the array and then format the 18tb drive as XFS. 2) Format the 18tb drive as XFS and then move the data onto the drive from the 6tb drive that's been pulled. Would one of these be a better solution than the other, or is there a better method I'm not thinking of?

That was going to be my next question since my plan was just to convert anyway. So replace the new drive with the original one, I assume this will now need to rebuild the drive again? Would it be safer to replace with a different 6tb drive so I can keep the original data intact in case of a worst case scenario? Then use unbalance to move the data off the 6tb disk, put the 18tb drive back in, format as XFS, and continue from there?

ok, finally up and running. Ran filesystem check and got the following: I've read the instructions for what to do next, but not really sure what happened with this drive. Preclear didn't have any errors and it wasn't until I put this drive into the array that there were errors. Is the best course of action to continue with the rebuild-sb command? What will happen to the data on the disk during this process? Would putting the original drive back in and exchanging the 18TB drive for a new one be an easier solution?

Rebuild finished. I restarted the server to see what it would do before running check filesystem and it's hung on Mounting that disk. Been going for twenty minutes now. Won't respond to reboot or shutdown commands....just stuck on Mounting the new disk drive.

Thanks, will do. I'm in the process of converting now, it's the reason I picked up the 18TB drives.

tower-diagnostics-20220126-0655.zip

Not sure what's going on here, but I was upgrading a 6TB drive to a 18TB drive and now the drive size is wrong. Unraid is showing Size as 408GB, Used as 18.4EB, and Free as 12.2TB. It also throws off the calcs for the total Array size. It shows 106TB where it should be 134TB, Used as 18.4EB, and Free as 25.6TB. Data Rebuild seems to be running properly. It shows the Total Size as 18TB and is closing in on 1TB complete. Should I just let this finish and restart and see if the problem corrects itself?

Yeah, I now know where I went wrong (and also shouldn't start a process I don't fully understand at 5am). It's just a matter of determining the best path forward. I figured at this point I should just let the drive continue the rebuild, but didn't know if stopping that and putting the old drive back in might have a recovery solution. Looks like I'll just let the new disk continue the data rebuild process, then move the files from the old one to the new disk, then start moving the data from the old rfs disks to the new xfs and so on until all the disks are xfs.

I read this thread too late and think I messed up while trying to convert from Reiserfs to xfs. I was trying to replace a 6TB drive with an 18TB drive, selected xfs as the file system, formatted the drive, and started the rebuild. Now it looks like the new drive is empty while the rebuild is completing (first post in this thread supports that). What's the best method here to try to recover the data? Just put the old 6TB drive in another computer and transfer over?