huyazo

Thanks Joe - up and running with no problems!

I made a stupid mistake while trying to follow the guide on how to mount a NTFS drive and copy files. The last step is to type the umount command on the NTFS disk, which in my case is sdh. By mistake I typed umount /dev/sdg - which is the last disk in my array. Very stupid - the main interface is unavailable and all the disks are unavailable. I have 5 disks (of which number 3 is IDE, the rest SATA), and one parity (also SATA). I am running on 4.5 beta 6. Please bear with my stupidity and help me. Is there a way to stop the array and reboot from root? I tried to save to syslog according to advice, but the command returned killed.

The one interesting thing I see with flexraid is the possibility to recover files I unintentionally deleted. 2-3 times I have been a bit careless in explorer and deleted files by mistake. I searched for tools to recover them, but found that the file system used by unRaid does not cater for old-fashioned recovery of deleted files. This to me is a big concern, I consider the risk of accidentally delete files higher than the risk of losing a disk... Maybe any of you experts have a good suggestion?? Also, I am looking for a way to utilize the big server for things like torrent downloads, codec conversions etc. But the posts I read about virtualization discouraged me, it seemed to be far too complex and problematic for a newbie.

OK, so I will have to be a bit more patient the next time. Joe, thank you for spending your time to explain so well, I really appreciate that! In the believe that I have now done the most stupid beginners mistakes, I have already sent my order for the Plus license, slaughtered one of my old 250 external Maxtor drives and installed it, ready for the license to arrive... This is the first IDE/ATA drive, so I am a bit exited if I will have issues with that. Håkon

Thanks, that explain a lot - and taught me not to use the Format button again. What still puzzles me, is that I did push the Stop button before I formatted, but it didn't stop - it just returned to the same page. I don't remember exactly what the screen said, wait... or some other message. Then, when I pushed the Refresh button again, it had not stopped and said nothing about being in the process to stop. It was actually the same as before I pushed the Stop button, showing the disk being unformatted, and with only the Refresh, Stop and Format buttons available. So my assumption was that the system would refuse to stop until the disk was formatted, which I now understand is fatally wrong, but I still would like to understand why it did not respond to the Stop button. Also, why wasn't the Restore button visible when the disk status was Unformatted? Håkon

I installed my unRAID server on Thursday, so I am a total newbie to the server should work. But something happened on Friday that made me worry. I had installed three brand new 500 GB disks, two WD and one Samsung. I had moved data to both of the data disks, connected both PCs and my Sono system to check that the server was working fine. The management console showed everthing ok, temperatures ranging from 24-32 Celcius. Suddenly the Samsung is not accesible and shows up in the panel as unformatted. Since I had not erased the source data yet, I pushed the Format button. (I would like to point out that I couldn't find any other button in the web-interface that made more sense to push.) After format, the disk was empty. No surprise. Next step, I thought was to recover the lost data from parity. After all if the disk had had a hw failure, I would have to reformat the new disk and restore from parity. So, I initiated the parity check. Which returned parity ok. That was a BIG surprise. I had expected a message telling me that the lost data would be restored based on the parity data. How can it be that I have two data disks and a parity disk up and running, status ok, and after reformatting one of them, parity is ok? Were all the data there, just that I didn't see it? I hope someone can help to explain this, so that my trust in the unRAID server can be restored :-) I mentioned the unformatted disk in another thread, immediately after it happened, and Joe L gave me the advice to use the reserfsck command. Unfortunately, I had already pushed the format button when I read that. Also, with a product like this, it should not be necessary to know Linux commands, everything should be managed through the web interface. Basically, I am concerned whether I can delete my source data or not, is the unRAID server mature immature? Or did I do something stupid the way I handled this? Håkon

Joe, thank you for your advices! Unfortunately, I had already formatted the disk. I had to reformat 2-3 times, but now it has been stable for 2 days after I checked the connectors and changed the power connector. I will let you all know (in the hardware forum if I get any more problems with the Samsung disk, as I have seen some more posts reporting problems with it. Håkon

Thanks Tom, I have no problems at all that these features are not being "built into" the underlying OS, I think you have done the right decision to prioritize a small footprint. I just want others to be aware that they can lose some files in the transfer process if they are "cheating" by using Linux commands rather than Windows OS tools. I assume what happens is that you are bypassing the layers 5-7 in the OSI model if you do this, which are taking care of formats and presentation. Now I am more worried about the disk I put in yesterday, which was working fine, but now it turns up as Unformatted. It was a brand new 500G Samsung, and I have successfully moved my music and pictures there. Of course, I still have the source files, so I will push the Format button. If this fixes the problem, I actually get worried. If it is not a HW problem, why did it suddenly turn unformatted? I assume that the array should recover the lost data after formatting... Well, I assume this belongs in another thread. Hakon

Hi, as a happy new unRAID user, I would like to share my experience of moving some gigs of music and movies the past couple of days. A lot of the files have non-English characters, like ñ in Spanish or ø in Norwegian. As suggested in the forums and the wiki, I decided to use cp command from the console for speed reasons. After copying, I wanted to check that everything had been moved. First I did an ls command on the console, and a lot of text rushed over the screen, looked promising. Then I used my alternative browser, FreeCommander, which also contains a synchronization tool. I was very surprised when all the files turned up as missing in target. Looking in the ordinary explorer part of FreeCommander, I could see them. Very strange. So, I did a compare using SyncBack and got a totally different result. SyncBack reported that most of the files were in the target, but I discovered quite a few files missing - and then whole directories missing. A closer inspection showed that all files and directories containing Norwegian characters æ, ø and å had not been copied. Files with Spanish, Portuguese, French and German special letters were copied, but the letters had been replaced with an underscore. My next step was to go to Windows Explorer to copy the missing files. Bug surprise again: No files in the target directories! After some investigation, where FreeCommander gave me the clue as it shows the Attributes, it turns out that the cp command turns on a the Hidden flag and the System flag on each and every file, resulting in all files being invisible in Windows Explorer. I managed quite easily to change the attributes with the chmod command, but when I realized how long it would take me to correct all the underscores and manually copy the missing files, I decided the far easiest solution was to delete everything I had moved, and use Windows Explorer on the source PC to copy files to the unRAID server. I didn't have any means to take the time on any of my transfers, but my gut feeling is that the difference is not big, and the result turned out perfect with Windows Explorer. You can even start several copy sessions in parallel before going to bed, as Windows does a great job in this respect. Well this turned into a long post, but my conclusion is very simple: avoid the Linux commands for file operations, as they don't give you the needed language and Windows support. I have been working professionally in the IT industry since 1983, and I have seen the lack of language support from US developers being repeated again and again. Now, as far as I know, Linus Torvald is Finnish, so he should know better... Hakon (my name is actually Håkon, but many mail systems still have problems with the å...) ps. I have updated the wiki description of transfer from network shares to unRAID.