captain_video

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Posts posted by captain_video

  1. Great!  I have a couple of disks that I'm running the long generic tests on before attempting to run a pre-clear on them.  They're 8TB drives so it could take about 45 hours or so to run pre-clear on one of them.  I'll post my results when the first one completes.

  2. On 2/5/2021 at 12:41 PM, Skxnk said:

    I'm getting this warning when trying to preclear an external driveb3410e6f7d4965e8465c458fb6af0ebf.png

    I got this exact same sequence of error messages when attempting to preclear a drive.  I have a slot in my server rack that I use specifically for pre-clearling drives.  I replaced the SATA cable and put the drive into a new slot in my server rack and the messages disappeared.  The drive did finally fail during the zeroing process at around the 75% complete point.  I pulled the drive and ran SeaTools on it and it failed the short drive self-test so it turned out the drive was bad.  I think this is actually unrelated to the error log you posted and feel it was more of a cable or backplane issue in my server.  I would suggest replacing the cable and try to pre-clear it again.

     

    I just realized you have an external drive, but it could still be a cable issue.  The vast majority of drives that I use in my unRAID server are drives shucked from external enclosures

  3. UnRAID version 6.9.1 and 2021.01.03 version of preclear.  I tried running preclear on a new disk and it craps out with the following errors in the log:

     

     

    Mar 15 15:28:51 preclear_disk_Z84013MY_11172: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/preclear.disk/script/preclear_disk.sh: line 475: /tmp/.preclear/sdaf/dd_output_complete: No such file or directory

    Mar 15 15:28:51 preclear_disk_Z84013MY_11172: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/preclear.disk/script/preclear_disk.sh: line 475: [: -gt: unary operator expected

    Mar 15 15:28:51 preclear_disk_Z84013MY_11172: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/preclear.disk/script/preclear_disk.sh: line 478: /tmp/.preclear/sdaf/dd_output_complete: No such file or directory

    Mar 15 15:28:51 preclear_disk_Z84013MY_11172: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/preclear.disk/script/preclear_disk.sh: line 480: /tmp/.preclear/sdaf/dd_output: No such file or directory

     

    The above messages are repeated about a dozen times before it just stops.  Note that the disk being precleared is designated as device sdaf.  This happened with the previous two versions of unRAID and I have always upgraded to the latest version of preclear when it was posted.  I've never had any issues with preclear before.  Is there a way to downgrade back to a previous version?

     

    I just removed the plugin and reinstalled it from the community apps tab.  I'm rebooting the server to see if I can get it working again.

     

    The server got hung up and would not complete the boot process.  This happened with the last drive I tried to pre-clear.  The server would boot fine if I removed the drive from the pre-clear slot.

     

    OK, I also swapped the slot where I had been inserting drives to perform the preclear as well as replacing the cable that was connected to the backplane.  Pre-clear is at 2% and counting.  So far so good.  This is the furthest it's gone since I started having these issues so I'm thinking it's either the backplane connector or the cable.

  4. I'm sure the drive I had was an exception to the rule.  I would like to think that these drives are decent enough to use in a PC or a server.  Mine just seems to be an aberration.  The weird thing is that it seemed to have no problems working on a Windows PC.  my UNRAID server just seemed to take great exception to it for some reason.  I've probably used about five dozen different drives in my unRAID server over the years and this is the first time I have ever experienced anything like this (I've got over 40 hard drives sitting on a shelf that were pulled from the server over the years due to upgrades).  The server has never had any problems booting regardless of which make or model drive I had installed in the array.

     

    Update:  I picked up some 8TB Seagate Archive drives on ebay and tried to run a pre-clear on one of them.  Had the exact same issue with the new drive.  The drive would show up as an unassigned drive in the array and would start the pre-clear process before crapping out after only a few minutes.  I uninstalled the pre-clear plugin and installed it again from the community apps tab.  When I booted up the server I had the same issue with it hanging up as I did with the WD drive.

     

    I shut down the server and swapped the drive and placed it into another empty slot in the server rack.  I used a different cable attached to the backplane and this time it booted with no problems.  I started running the pre-clear plugin with the new configuration and so far everything is looking good so I'm thinking it was either the cable or the backplane connection that was causing the issue.

  5. I've been gradually upgrading all of the 3TB and 4TB drives in my server with 8TB drives as they get a lot of age on them.  I have about a 60-40 mix of Seagate to WD drives with a few HGST drives mixed in.  I've never had this issue with any drive before, regardless of manufacture or capacity.  I used to have a lot of 1.5TB Samsung drives and never had a single failure using them.  I believe Seagate bought them out years ago so they're pretty much defunct now.  I also had a handful of Toshiba 3TB drives, but they have since been upgraded with 8TB drives.  The server is currently at 176 TB capacity and counting.  I've been running unRAID for about 11 years or more and couldn't be happier.  It's been running off the same 1 TB flash drive for most of that time so that drive is probably living on borrowed time.

  6. I believe that was mentioned in one of the articles I saw.  I have to wonder if that's going to become a trend with newer WD drives.  I'm hoping that the shortage of red drives was the real issue and they will start using them again once supply catches up with the demand.  I won't buy another 8 TB WD drive in an external enclosure until I'm sure I'm getting one of the other drives.  I'm perfectly fine with using Seagate.  Over half of the drives used in my server are either 4TB or 8TB Seagates shucked from external enclosures and they're still working just fine.

  7. I did some further research and it seems that Western Digital is using a different drive in the 8TB easy store external enclosures.  Speculation is that there's a shortage of the WD red drives that they had been using so they went with a different drive that they had on hand.  Apparently these drives get extremely hot and are not very good from that aspect, especially in an external enclosure.  That doesn't answer my question about why it doesn't work in UNRAID or why it causes the server to bog down or completely freeze during bootup. 

     

    I reinstalled the drive back in the enclosure and reformatted it so it could be recognized in Windows.  It just doesn't have the WD extra partition or software on it anymore.  I took it back to Best Buy and they gave me a refund.

  8. UNRAID version 6.8.3

     

    I recently purchased a WD 8TB EasyStore external drive from Best Buy that contained a WD80EDAZ drive.  I've been shucking drives from external enclosures for years and never had any issues with them.  All of the other WD drives in my server are WD80EMAZ or WD80EZAZ models and they work fine with no issues.  I am using a 24-bay Supermicro server rack in conjunction with an 8-bay Supermicro rack all connected to the same ASUS A88X-PRO motherboard in the larger rack.  I have a single extra SATA slot in the smaller rack that I use to pre-clear drives exclusively.  I have tried running a pre-clear on this drive several times and it just quits after a few minutes with an error.  I don't recall what the exact error was but it would always crap out after just a few minutes.  The server backplane is powered by 4-pin Molex connectors from the PSU so there's never been an issue with the 3.3V signal on pin 3 since it simply isn't there.

     

    I pulled the drive and ran the WD Data Lifeguard diagnostics on a standalone PC that I use for that purpose, both short and long tests, and it passed.  I performed a quick erase to get rid of the extra partition that WD installs with their external drives.  When I reinstalled the drive back in my server it just bogged everything down to the point where it was extremely slow to boot or just failed to boot altogether.  I saw some kind of error message about SATA9 and that the transfer rate was dialed back to 1.5 Gb/s on the one occasion where it did actually boot up, but the drive didn't show up on the web GUI as an unassigned drive.

     

    I removed the drive from the array and now it boots up just fine so it's definitely what's causing the boot issue.  I am currently running a full erase on the drive to see if that helps.  Right now I'm stumped since this drive does not seem to be compatible with my server.  The Windows 7 PC that I use to run the diagnostics boots with no problems with this drive connected.

     

    Does anyone else have any experience using this drive in their server?  If so, have you run across any similar issues and what did you do to correct them?

  9. I'm using an Asus A88X-PRO motherboard with a quad-core AMD A10 CPU (I forget the exact model).  The motherboard can take up to 64 GB of memory (4 x 16 GB).  I just upgraded it to 32 GB and it's running fine.  I checked the UEFI BIOS on the motherboard when I booted it up and it sees all four 8GB DIMMs.  I checked the dashboard in unRAID (Pro version 6.6.7) and it says there's 32 GB installed, but only 14.977 GB usable with a max installable capacity of 64 GB.  Is there a limitation on the amount of RAM that unRAID can use?

     

    imageproxy.php?img=&key=00b562fcac28e727

    image.png

  10. OK.  Thanks.  Data rebuild for the new drive won't be completed until late tonight and the pre-clear on the 2nd drive will probably finish late tomorrow night.  Both drives are 8 TB.  That means I won't get a chance to try this until Tuesday at the earliest.

     

    Update:  I did a filesystem check from the web GUI after stopping the array and putting it into maintenance mode.  After running the repair with various options I was finally able to repair the drive with minimal data loss, but nothing that couldn't be replaced.  I wish I had known about this feature when this problem first occurred.  I lost data from at least one other drive because of this issue.

     

    I'm curious if my hardware setup had anything to do with it.  All of the affected drives were in a Supermicro 5-bay internal enclosure that was connected to the mainboard SATA ports using eSATA adapter brackets and 6-ft long eSATA to SATA data cables.  I was always getting a lot of UDMA errors on the same drives so I was wondering if that could have contributed to the corrupted file systems.  I have since reconnected the drives directly to the mainboard without all of the adapters and long cables in the signal paths and so far I haven't seen any UDMA errors.

  11. So what's the best approach to fixing a drive  that says "Unmountable: No file system?"  Does this mean that xfs_repair won't work until the bug is fixed in the next release of unRAID?  I've had multiple drives fail over the past few weeks with this issue and it's only happened with the latest releases of unRAID.  I've been running unRAID for over 10 years and never had any issues like this before.  The weird thing is that it was only affecting drives that I had installed in an enclosure connected to the main server (it's a Supermicro 5-bay internal enclosure that I have sitting on top of the server chassis).  I have since connected the enclosure directly to the motherboard SATA ports to eliminate any potential problems with the cabling as I was getting a lot of UDMA errors with several drives in the enclosure.

     

    I am currently running a parity rebuild on a replacement drive for the one that had the unmountable file system, but I'm getting the same error message with the new drive.  After reading about the issue I see that it's just rebuilding the corrupted file system from parity.  I will attempt to run xfs_repair after the data gets rebuilt.  I still have the original drive in case I need to run it on that one.  I've already lost a ton of data and I may never be able to recover a lot of it.  I'm still taking an inventory of what I might have lost and I've only scratched the surface.

     

    I'm also running a pre_clear on another drive in the background so I need to wait until that finishes before attempting anything that might require a reboot.

     

    I see that upgrading to xfsprogs 4.19 may fix the problem with xfs_repair.  I've downloaded the xfsprogs-4.19.0.tar.xz file but I have no idea what to do with it.

     

    I just saw that there's a newer version so I downloaded  xfsprogs-4.19.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz from https://archlinux.pkgs.org/rolling/archlinux-core-x86_64/xfsprogs-4.19.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz.html.  I'm not well versed in Linux or FreeBSD line commands so I'm probably better off waiting for the next release of unRAID with the fix.  Any idea when it will be released?

  12. Here's the diagnostics file that you requested

     

    tower-diagnostics-20181229-1036.zip

     

    I'm going through the various shares to see what data was lost and it's quite considerable.  I may never get it all sorted out.  I have a share for music and the share folder is showing as completely empty.  I had well over 1,000 CDs ripped to my server and spent the past several months getting them all named and tagged properly.  I'm going through the individual disks one at a time to take inventory of what remains so I can figure out what's missing.  This totally sucks.

  13. Running unRAID Pro 6.6.6, 28 data drives (130TB) with dual parity and a 1TB SSD cache drive.  I have 23 of the data drives mounted in a 24-bay Supermicro 846 chassis and five of the drives in a Supermicro 5-drive bay connected via shielded SATA cables connected directly to the server motherboard. Both parity drives are mounted inside the 24-bay enclosure.  One is in one of the standard drive bays and the other is mounted on the drive bracket attached to the side of the power supply bay.

     

    Last night one of the drives in the 5-bay enclosure had a red X next to it in the web GUI.  Under the two columns that showed the capacity of the drive and the amount used it indicated "Unmountable:  No file system."  I shut down the array and swapped out the 4TB drive that had the error with a new 8TB drive that I had already precleared.  I restarted the array and allocated the new drive to the array and started a data rebuild.  While it was being rebuilt, another drive in the enclosure started showing all kinds of errors and an enormous number of writes to the drive.  The new drive was no longer being written to so the data rebuild had halted.  The drive that was replaced was still showing the "Unmountable: No file system" indication.  I shut down the array again and replaced the second drive that was having all of the write errors with another new 8TB drive that had been precleared.  I also replaced the new drive that I had installed as a replacement for the original drive that showed the errors.  I started the array and assigned the new drives to the two slots where the previous drive had been having the write errors as well as the original one with the unmountable file system.  I try to keep several spare drives on hand that have been precleared just for such an emergency.

     

    After a while I noticed that a third drive in the enclosure was having a large number of write errors and now both new drives were showing the "Unmountable:  No file system" message and again it had stopped the data rebuild for both new drives.  I canceled the data rebuild and shut down the array.  I swapped out the 5-bay enclosure with another one that I had on hand and powered up the array once again.  The data rebuild started but I am still getting the "Unmountable:  No file system" indication for the two drives, but the third drive with the write errors was now behaving normally.  It looks like it is going through a normal data rebuild, but I have no idea what data it's putting on the two drives.  I suspect that whatever is being written is simply corrupted and the data is lost.  I would expect it to show the capacity of each drive plus the amount of data to be restored instead of the file system error message.  The display attached to the server is indicating metadata CRC errors and there's another message to unmount and run XFS repair.  I'm at a total loss right now.  I've been running unRAID for over 10 years and I've never seen anything like this before.  I've attached the system log and a couple of screen shots to show the error messages.  The two parity drives are not shown because it would have cut off the drives at the bottom of the screen.  You will notice that I am also running a preclear on another drive in the background.  The total capacity is also being shown as 122TB instead of the previous 130TB due to the two missing 4TB data drives (disks 26 and 27).

     

    image.thumb.png.82a168834f63e653da3d5c67775d6b85.png

     

    image.thumb.png.5365d7255f5fb0e602fca81b4789a969.png

    tower-syslog-20181228-1214.zip

  14. I've never been able to perform a backup and restore to a network drive using unRAID.  I believe the rescue disk will only look for drives that are physically attached to the computer that contain the backup image.  I just use an external USB docking bay with a spare drive to backup and restore Windows images.  You could probably use any external USB drive as well.  Either that or any additional drive installed in your PC can be used to store the backup image.

  15. External drives have really poor cooling as they are strictly passive and placed in a plastic enclosure that does not transmit heat.  They're also running off a wall wart AC adapter instead of a well regulated power supply.  I use external drives in my unRAID array almost exclusively, but I pull them from the enclosures first.  The drives used in external enclosures are the same as the desktop drives that you typically pay more for and have a longer warranty.  The warranty is shorter for external drives because they're not expected to last as long for the very reasons I just mentioned -  poorly regulated power and poor ventilation.  If you pull them from the enclosures and mount them in a server or desktop case they will more than likely last as long as their desktop counterparts.  Of course, pulling them from the enclosures voids the warranty, but doing so almost guarantees that they'll last longer than the warranty period anyway.

  16. I've upgraded the BIOS on every motherboard I've ever owned and never bricked a single on of them, and I've owned more motherboards than I can count.  I once contracted a virus that infected my BIOS and reflashing the BIOS got rid of it so sometimes it's a necessity for various reasons.  I recently had an email account hacked and inadvertently opened an email from the hacker telling me he had installed ransomware on my PC and wanted me to pay him in bitcoin.  I immediately disconnected my PC from the internet and shut down the PC.  I pulled all of the data drives and copied them to my server using another PC and a USB docking station.  Once I had all of the data copied I wiped the drives and trashed them.  I installed a new OS drive in my PC and did a fresh install from scratch after reflashing my BIOS just to be on the safe side.  I installed new data drives in the PC and formatted and partitioned them as before and then copied the data from my server back onto the new drives. 

     

    Of course, I changed my email password using a different PC since the hacker said he was using a program that would alert him if I tried to change my password.  What he didn't know was that I never open my email on my PC but always view it remotely on their server.  I have since received several more emails from the hacker that I immediately deleted without opening.  This happened about a month ago and my PC is working perfectly. I had to laugh because he also told me he got hold of my contact list from my email account.  I looked at the list and there were only a couple of email addresses from people I know.  The rest of them were probably put there by spammers.  I contacted the few people in the list that I actually knew and told them not to open any emails from me using that email address and gave them all my current address.  The irony is that the account that got hacked was an account that I don't use anymore.  What's funny is that I'm hoping he sends emails to the other addresses in my contact list and spams the spammers.  Now that would be true justice.

     

    The point to all of this is that flashing your BIOS is a simple task and not one you should be afraid to perform.  Just follow the instructions posted on the download site for the latest BIOS file and you should have no problems.

     

    I should also like to mention that I have since switched to using a password manager instead of the simple password that got hacked for all of my accounts.  It was far too easy for someone to crack but I was just too lazy to change it.  I can never remember long passwords, especially complicated ones.

  17. 1 hour ago, johnnie.black said:

    Did your format the drive before, during or after the rebuild?

     

    Most "failed" drives are cable/connection issues, if you want next time pos time post the diagnostics so you can get some advice.

    I didn't format the drive at all.  The only thing I do to a new drive is perform a preclear running in the background so it's ready to install when needed.  The drive was installed in the array as a blank precleared drive and then the data was rebuilt from parity.  The drive gets formatted on the fly as part of the data rebuild.  All of my drives were migrated from ReiserFS to XFS quite some time ago.

     

    Anytime I start to see a drive look like it's about to fail I always shut down the array and check my connections.  I pull the drive and reseat it in the backplane and then check the cable connection between the backplane and the controller card.  I also pull the card and reseat it in the PCI-e slot.

  18. I had a 4TB drive fail a while back so I replaced it with a new 8TB drive.  The data rebuild seemed to go fine and everything was back to normal.  It wasn't until several days later that I noticed that the new drive only contained a few hundred GB of data when it originally contained about 3TB.  I don't know what happened, but apparently whatever data was written to the drive simply disappeared.  It was all media files that were replaceable so it wasn't a disaster.  It was just a strange occurrence that I had never seen before.  I've been running unRAID for about 10 years now and I try to keep it up to date.  This happened about 4 or 5 months ago so I was using an older version of unRAID 6.  I'm currently running unRAID Pro version 6.6.5 with dual parity drives, 28 data drives, a 1TB SSD cache drive and a current capacity of 130TB with 45.4TB free.

     

    On another note, it seems like unRAID likes to report drive failures more frequently than before.  I've replaced at least a couple of "failed" drives over the past several months.  I always buy extra drives when I see them on sale and do a preclear so they're ready to go in case of a drive failure.  The thing is, I've run complete diagnostics on the "failed" drives using either WD Data Lifeguard or SeaTools and they've all passed with flying colors.  I then do a full erase and run another preclear to use them as a replacement drive.  I don't know if it's just a glitch in the system or if unRAID is overly sensitive to reporting drive failures, but so far every drive that has been reported as failed in the array lately has tested fine.  None of them reported S.M.A.R.T. failures at any time.  If I see a S.M.A.R.T. failure I know the drive is toast and just trash it.

  19. I reinstalled the linuxserver Plex docker and finally got the volumes mapped correctly.  The Plex webGUI couldn't find the shares in unRAID because I was entering the wrong paths in the entry fields.  It's currently in the process of rebuilding the libraries.  The flash drive is the same one that's been plugged into my server going on about ten years now.  I don't know why it didn't show up under the previously installed apps, but there was nothing there.  Plex is the only docker I have installed.

     

    I try to keep unRAID up to date.  I'm wondering if files get purged after a certain amount of time or if they get deleted when updating the OS.  FWIW, I had uninstalled the limetech Plex docker and that is now showing up in the previous apps as you would expect.

  20. 2 minutes ago, trurl said:

     

    If you don't know that you don't know how to use dockers.

     

    Here is the FAQ:

     

    https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/57181-real-docker-faq/

     

    It's been quite some time since I set it up so I've forgotten a lot of things since then.  After looking at the FAQ it jogged my memory about some of the things I did before to get it working.  Thanks for pushing me in the right direction.

  21. 1 hour ago, trurl said:

     

    You should have used Community Applications Previous Apps feature to reinstall your docker as it was originally. You will have to figure out what you did before. Most likely you don't have any volumes mapped to your media.

    I checked the Previously Installed Apps and it says No Matching Content Found.  How would I map volumes to my media?  I haven't changed anything in my setup that I'm aware of since I first installed Plex.  I don't recall having any problems setting Plex up before.

     

    I installed the latest linuxserver Plex and disabled the limetech PlexMediaServer so they're both installed, but only the linuxserver Plex is running.  I have the same issues with both versions of Plex.

  22. I had the linuxserver Plex running fine on my unRAID server and then I decided to swap out my cache drive for a larger one.  I lost Plex in the process because the appdata folder was on the old cache drive.  It tried reinstalling Plex, but I mistakenly installed the limetech PlexMediaServer version.  I tried adding libraries using the web GUI with no luck.  When I browsed for folders it displayed what you see in the attached image.  I can't see any of the media files on my server.  How do I get to the shares on my server?

     

    image.thumb.png.95cf3a17c6d6a6cca9bbe525a130d9f8.png

  23. I upgraded the preclear plugin recently and I'm currently running the plugin on an 8TB Seagate drive pulled from a Back-Up Plus external enclosure.  The pre-read process took about 14 hours, which is about normal for the size drive in my setup.  The zeroing process was at about 10.5 MB/s when it started the process and then slowed to about 9 MB/s.  Right now the process is at 91% and it's been running for over 218 hours.  I saw another thread on how to replace the current script with the 2018.05.03 version which is supposed to run much faster.  I've precleared the exact same drives before and never had a problem until upgrading to the latest plugin.  I'm going to let the current preclear run to completion.  I figure it should finish the zeroing process in another 23 hours, give or take, and then run the post-read process.  If I don't have any luck using that older plugin on another drive I have waiting then I'll probably give this one a try.

  24. 45 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

    It should be.

     

    You should see a nice bump in parity check speed, though if you have 24 disks, and depending on the CPU and if you have single or dual parity, it can also be a bottleneck.

    I actually have 29 disks with a single parity drive, although I plan to add a 2nd parity drive soon.  Current storage capacity is at 112TB.  The CPU is an AMD A10-7700K.  The extra five drives are in 5-bay Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B enclosure located externally to the server case connected with shielded eSATA cables and power extension cables.  They are all connected directly to the motherboard SATA ports.  I also have a 250GB SSD as a cache drive connected to the 6th motherboard SATA port.  I plan to use that port for the 2nd parity drive and connect the cache drive to a dual-port SATA controller mounted in a spare PCI-e X1 slot.

     

    I'm just trying to determine if it's worth the expense to replace the backplane and the controller cards.  I've been replacing my 1080p Blu-Ray rips with 4K rips as they become available and the files are taking a very long time to transfer.  I've got them all converted to mkv format.