My beloved unraid server "Akira" is sick and I’ve been pulling my hair out for days. I'm running Unraid v6.8.3, it's 14 WD 2TB Green drives plus two parity drives and a WD Black cache drive. 99.9% of the cycles are plex server via docker, 99.9% of the content is plex media.
Diagnostic zip attached.
Stuck at home during the covid pandemic I decided to try setting up a time machine share to backup a MacBook. I had previously tried it on AFP and only experienced failure and given up, but I had read that time machine backups worked well on the newer versions of unraid now that it migrated to SMB so I was excited to try again. I created a new share, locked it to a single empty drive (Drive 1), disabled cache and started my backup, and it was working. I was happy. I mention this not because I think it’s the problem, but because I think that was my previous mistake and maybe that info will help someone.
The problem started during the backing up process, I noticed a smart alert on disk 7 indicating the drive was starting to fail. I wasn’t worried about it as the backup was to drive 1 and I have double parity. My unraid server has been running in one form or another for an entire decade, so I am confident I've replaced all of the drives at least once, and was used to it. I ordered another one and slapped it in for a rebuild after the backup to Drive 1 finished… but that’s when everything went sour.
During the rebuild of Disk 7, Disk 3 suddenly vanished and showed up as “Unmountable: No file system”… which I’d never seen before. There were no warnings of an impending failure, but I assumed the parity rebuilding of Disk 7 simply accessed disk 3 enough that a problem was exposed... but I found it odd that it wasn’t being emulated via the dual parity. I figured maybe the system can recover two drives but maybe not emulate two drives? Either way, once the parity rebuild finished I I slapped in another spare drive to try and rebuild disk 3… but it actually only offered me the option to format it, which had me worried about data loss, so I didn’t... it was about here that I started looking for help.
I found this thread that taught me how to fix the file system on an unmountable drive (I see a fair number of threads on this popping up) however I am scared to do that when I’m down two drives.
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/69765-solved-unmountable-no-file-system/
Meanwhile my rebuild of Disk 7, which I thought completed without issue, is actually not working at all. Despite the parity rebuild completing the drive continues to say contents emulated and device disabled.
I worry perhaps my power supply has simply aged to the point where it’s not providing enough juice for stable operation and that’s caused the problems so if I keep trying it will only get worse. (I have been thinking it was time to rebuild the entire system with less drive bays now that there are 10-14 TB drives on sale anyway).
I also assumed that if I wasn't adding anything to the drives my parity would save me, but I have discovered that my time machine backups just kept going throughout this entire process so now I'm worried the parity has gotten mangled.
So now I’m down two drives and concerned about data loss, and I don’t want to take any action without the advice of someone better at this than me.
I’ve also now stupidly lost track of which of these old drives were #3 & #7, assuming there’s even a way to try and salvage as much off them as is possible.
Please help. I would happily pay Limetech for support here if such a service was offered.
Question 1: Why is disk 7 still saying it's disabled and being emulated after a rebuild?
2: Is it safe to try and fix the file system of Disk 3 when down a drive? Or Two?
3: How can I determine if my power supply isn't providing enough juice?
4: How can I find out which was which drive?
5: How can I get any data off the old drives? I have windows machines and mac machines I could throw the drives in but I don't think they can be read by either?
akira-diagnostics-20200507-0717.zip