GreggP

I decided to run the command line utility diskpart clean all to prepare my used unRAID drive for formatting in Windows 11. Probably overkill but it definitely cleans out all remnants of the ReiserFS file system. I also ran Western Digital's 'Dashboard' program to check the health of the drive.

I'm no longer using my old unRAID server; realistically, I don't think I'd be able to sell it. It's a basic tower PC running the old v5.05 unRAID software. I built the system way back around 2010. I'd like to utilize the hard drives after removing them from the server. I plan to plug them into an external USB drive docking station and then use them to back up my Lightroom catalog and RAW photo image files. These docking stations are attached to my Windows 11 laptop. Is there anything I should do to prepare them for re-formatting for NTFS? Years ago, I used one of my former unRAID 1 TB drives after swapping it out for something larger. I installed it in one of my PCs and formatted it to NTFS. It failed a few months afterward. I was able to recover some files with special recovery software (I don't remember what I used). During this process, I discovered that Windows was having trouble with the ReiserFS partition. So I wondered if I should've done something prior to just formatting. Maybe a preclear... Someone on the r/unRAID subreddit suggested just running 'diskpart clean'. Would that be enough?

Joe, thanks again for your help. I've run pre-clear on the "sdg" drive again. This is the one that had 4 reallocated sectors (0 pending). I've copied the contents of the screen to my clipboard: Not sure what it means by "error count difference detected after pre-clear" and the offline data collection activity - "was never started" and "was suspended by an interrupting command." Is the script trying to do something it can't execute? With my other new drive (the one with no reallocated sectors), I don't think there were any text strings following the line that showed the drive was successfully pre-cleared. Anyhow, I ran another smart report and it shows nothing has changed. The reallocated sector count is the same. So hopefully this drive (sdg) is good to go. SMART_report_for_sdg_drive_after_2nd_pre-clear.txt

I also just generated a smart report that shows there are 4 sectors that have been reallocated and no pending re-allocations. Before running pre-clear on this drive the SMART report showed 1 allocated sector with 3 pending re-allocation. So it looks like those 3 were reallocated. Does this mean my drive is okay? SMART_report_for_sdg_drive.txt original_SMART_report_for_sdg_drive.txt

I recently purchased a couple of new 2TB Hitachi drives and tried replacing both my 1TB parity and disk1 drives. I followed the instructions from the "official" unRAID manual which doesn't include several steps recommended by knowledgeable users like Joe L., including parity checks and running pre-clear on the new drives. After replacing the parity drive everything seemed fine, but after replacing the disk1 data drive, 151 errors were reported for the parity drive. More info is available in this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=8096.msg78237#msg78237 Joe explained how to get my array back to its previous state with the 1TB drives. And, yesterday, I finished pre-clearing both the new 2TB Hitachi drives. However, before I put them in my array, I wanted to ask a few questions about the results of the pre-clear. I ran the pre-clears from 2 PuTTY session windows. At the end of the session for one of the disks, there were several errors listed. I don't know how to interpret these errors, so I tried copying & pasting the text to a txt file. Unfortunately, I didn't know that common Windows copy/paste techniques could result in pasting back into the PuTTY window. Afterwards, I also discovered the command for copying everything in the PuTTY window to the clipboard. Because of my sloppy copy/paste mess, it is hard to interpret my pre-clear results. I would get a syslog, but my server (and all other computers in my home) were shut down last night during a very rare power failure in our neighborhood. I've attached the session text from both of the drives to this message in case someone can decipher these and help me out. The "sda" drive doesn't seem to have any errors. However, the "sdg" drive might have some problems. I'd like to know whether this drive needs to be returned to Newegg because I want to make sure I do so within the terms of their return policy (not sure if it is 15 or 30 days). Pre-Clear_session_for_sdg_drive.txt Pre-Clear_session_for_sda_drive.txt