AquaVixen

If I was using a real raid card instead of unraid it could recover from a failed rebuild with only 1 parity drive. If Unraid is trying to mimic a RAID system then it should be able to do it too.

If you're a moderator of the unraid forums I'm honestly rather surprised you don't know this and a little confused as to why you're asking someone who has only used unraid for 18 days how to do this. I would assume you of all people should know how to do that. I found it in google. Just google for "How to upgrade capacity of parity drive in an unraid array" without quotes and it should be on the first page. That's what I did. But since you actually seem to don't know (some how??) I'll inform you I suppose: Stop array -> Disconnect parity disk with system running (helps to have a hot swap drive cage for this, just pop the tray out) -> Start array with parity missing -> Wait for array to start up with parity drive missing -> Stop array -> Replace parity drive with similar drive but of higher capacity -> wait for replacement drive to show up as unmounted in array drive list -> Tell unraid to assign the new higher capacity drive as the parity drive -> Start array -> Viola -> Unraid automagically rebuilds the array with the higher capacity drive and at the same time upgrades the capacity of the parity drive -> We can then proceed to repeat this process with any other drive(s) in the array and replace them with higher capacity drives and expand the array's total capacity. Don't even have to power off the computer/server either. I followed the documentation on the unraid website and a video by space invader one on how to rebuild the array(s) with unraid. Apparently something that either the programmers for unraid failed to account for is the possibility that the replacement drive could die during the rebuild process and the rebuild process could fail before completing. Anyway. It's already made clear to me several things: 1.) My files are completely gone forever and will never be recovered (I asked repeatedly for help. All these replies and back and forth and no one has helped me with that so I give up now). 2.) Personally I don't like unraid. I've been using hardware raid cards since the early 2000's at home and in many computers and servers in enterprise environments when I worked as a datacenter floor tech. I've never seen corruption like this in any computer or configuration just from trying to reconstruct/rebuild an array, raid or not. I know you say "UNRAID IS NOT RAID"... by it's very nature anything that has a "parity drive" and can "rebuild from a drive failure" is "A type of RAID". Those are the definitions of a RAID system. Which I might want to take a moment to remind you of what that means: RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Unraid has an array. It's also redundant against a failure. Therefore Unraid is a type of RAID. It fits the literal definition of the term. You can reply and say whatever you want but I honestly don't really care anymore. I probably won't be reading or replying to this thread after this post. This was my first unraid experience and it definitely will be my last.

I have the array's shares mounted as network shares with a virtual drive letter on my windows 10 machine. I have some games installed to / stored on the array. I started up one game and all of it's save files and configuration files were suddenly missing as well as some of the game's files and I had to do a verify with steam and re-download 1GB of data before the game would launch again. I have a MUCK client (weird I know, but whatever) that it's configuration file was completely missing as well as half the log files it had generated over the past 5 days. All of that was there before this "botched rebuild" failed and after unraid said it completed the rebuild with errors those files physically do not exist on the array anymore. I live alone and I am the only person in the house accessing these two computers. No one else has touched them. Anyway.. this has been a nightmare experience and seriously soured me on Unraid in general. For years I've been relying exclusively on hardware raid cards. In the past I have had replacement drives die or fail during a rebuild on hardware raid cards and it's never led to generalized array-wide corruption and data loss like this.

I wanted to add bigger drives to the array and replace the small 160GB drives I started with with a mix of 750 and 500 GB drives to expand the array. Unraid will not allow us to replace any of the drives with a larger capacity drive unless we first replace the parity drive with a larger capacity drive to be the same or larger capacity than the other drives we install later. I had to replace the parity drive with a 1TB one or I couldn't replace the other array drives with larger drives later.

I already submitted the diagnostics earlier in this thread as an attachment.

I see. So even though it appeared to work correctly for the first 18 days, it really wasn't working correctly and the issues with the drives and the corrupted array and failed rebuild and all of that is just because the Marvell SATA controller on this RocketRaid card doesn't play well with Linux / Unraid? Hrmm okay then. I don't have any other hardware that will be compatible with Unraid so I guess I'll just scrap the entire unraid project and go back to using windows on a hardware raid card. Shame. Unraid looks nice and I was hoping it would work.

That's not very helpful... I know Disk1 is a problem. It died during the rebuild. As in completely dead. I already told you that in the first post. Also I'm not sure what "Marvell" controller you are referring to. It's using a HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 adapter (I think it uses a Marvell chipset). It is NOT configured in any sort of RAID mode. I did not even touch the configuration on the thing. I just connected the drives and it exported it fine. Also no I can not connect the disks in this system without it. It only has 3 onboard SATA ports and only 2 work. One of which I'm using for the SSD for a cache drive. I was trying to use a second SSD and make a 2-SSD Cache pool but I never could figure out how to do that so I abandoned that idea and eventually just went without a cache entirely. This system was working perfectly fine with no issues for about 18 days with the HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 in it. It was only when 1 of the drives died and I tried to rebuild it yesterday where I had problems. None of that you commented has anything to do with my issue. The problem is the array is corrupted after disk1 failed during a rebuild process. I was trying to ask you: How can I recover from this? How can I recover my missing files? How can I make the array healthy again with no errors? The problem is not the controller. The problem is a faulty disk that failed and that's all.

Here you go. I removed and/or redacted some personally identifiable information in the files. Like the local LAN IP of my server and other computers in my network as well as the names and information about my virtual machines. Everything else I left in there. summer-nas-diagnostics-20220630-1649.zip

I would be happy to but that's to take a little time for me to read through all of the information captured in the diagnostic report and see what it lists in there first.

So I'm trying out unraid and one of the random hard drives I had chosen to use failed on me. I grabbed another random drive, checked out SMART (healthy no errors or warnings) in a windows computer and I did a hdtune surface scan in a windows machine, drive seemed to pass but apparently not. I put it in my unraid box to try and rebuild and the drive I chose to rebuild to failed about 30% into the rebuild and died (I'm having terrible luck here) So I bought a brand new drive to replace it and put that in then completed the rebuild fine. But now that the rebuild actually completed I see this message that the array has errors. And indeed several of the files I expected to be there just actually aren't there at all / Deleted / Poof missing. So how do I recover from this? How do I repair these errors and restore the files? Does unraid have any way to do this? To be clear: I had 4 drives in the array. The other 3 drives never failed. The only thing that failed during the rebuild was the replacement drive I was trying to rebuild to. The other 3 drives were still there before, during, and after the rebuild process. I did not lose an additional drive out of the array during the rebuild. Which I could understand would lead to total data loss but that's not what happened. I'm really sad and at a loss now. I was excited to use unraid but if there's no way out of this situation to get my files back then I don't think I'll be able to rely on it if unraid is going to randomly delete files from the array just because the replacement drive we installed dies during the rebuild process. That's a common thing that can happen. EDIT: I do have all of the data stored in this unraid system backed up on a second machine, which most of it was just copied into unraid while I explore, test, and learn about unraid. So I haven't actually lost anything. But at the same time.... this sucks and means unraid is unreliable for real usage as a file server I think? Unless someone can enlighten me to something I'm missing.