I have been attempting to fix this for a few months with various attempts so I apologize in advance.
I have a 12 disk array with a double parity.
To begin, I had a parity drive fail and while waiting for a new drive to come in unraid attempted to do a parity check and found errors. (this was months ago I do not remember specifics or logs). Two drives were then kicked out of the array, the second parity and disk 11 ( this is the drive of focus). When the array was stopped I would attempt to assign the drives to their spots but unraid would then kick them out and remove them from the ui. One guide suggested back wires so I replaced all pcie cards and sata cables (this is primarily were the delay came from).
I have since attempted many guides etc and believe each of those attempts just messed the software side up. So this is where I am at now.
One drive sounds like a bowling alley and isn't recoverable. The other two I can still access the data from externally. I had found a guide at some point but don't have access to now, that said I could manually replace the drive and so that's what I attempted.
I got three new drives and cleared them, then cleared and hardware mirrored the data for disk 11 just to get everything back up and verified. I have the new disk in slot 11 but unraid insists that it's incorrect (yes). I thought the hardware mirror would overwrite the disk id but that seems to not be the case.
I tried to rename the drive in unraid but it still recognizes it. Before I messed with config files or deleted historical device info, I gave up and decided to just ask for help directly. The search terms for this particular issue overlap with so many other topics that I have been un sucessful in finding answers.
tldr: I need to overwrite the id for a disk slot so that a manually replaced drive is accepted.
Thanks.