So tonight I attempted to remove an old (emptied) drive my my array and recalculate parity to minimize the number of disks I had running and improve my parity check speed. I was conservative when doing this operation and:
A) Screencapped my disk configuration from the main menu
B) Used a preclear'ed new disk for a new parity
C) Removed the old drive
D) Backed-up my flash before restarting
When I brought the server back up again, used "New Config" and re-assigned all my drives as they were previously (with the new parity drive). When I brought the array online to recalculate, one disk (1TB, "disk4") started reporting hundreds of reading errors. ["shiz"]. I stopped the calcs, shut the machine down, re-checked all the cable connections, and brought it back up. Now this disk was being reported as Unformatted. Ran reiserfsck --check on it and was reported a bad superblock. ["super shiz"].
I decide to back out to rebuild disk4- I re-install the original parity disk, the old disk, and re-flash my usb key with the old configuration. This time the box starts up like a charm and begins the array on its own. The entire file structure of disk4 is even visible and the few pictures and videos I sampled off the drive seem to be fine. However, if I do a non-correct Parity Check, it errors out instantly with over 248 parity errors.
So I ask the experts - what should my next move be? I have a 2TB preclear'ed drive sitting in standby. Do I swap disk4 with the preclear'ed drive and rebuild, assuming that it was damaged somehow by the read errors? Do I do smart on every drive with the array offline and attempt to find a different drive that's reporting errors? Do I do something I don't even know about?
*I'll note that I ran two parity checks before starting this operation, so everything was fine at the beginning!
Running version 5.0.4
Thanks for any help you can offer!
deleteme