ratmice

Brand new flash drive was the answer to regain access. All config lost due to poltergeist (I guess?) Thanks @JorgeB and @itimpi for helping me get back up.

This is what I was trying to determine. Thanks. I assume doing a non-correcting parity check will confirm that the disks are indeed assigned correctly if it doesn't throw a million errors.

I was able to get the server to start and access the GUI. But, it appears that the upgrade from earlier has borked all my config files so disk assignments are gone, shares are gone, dockers gone, plugins gone, etc... I know everything was working fine this am, is there a safe way to reassign disks, etc... without screwing up data on the drives? I have a screenshot of the drive assignments, so I think they can be put back as they were. If I tell it that parity is already valid, I assume it will forego the parity check. is there any danger (data loss) if I have any of the disk assignments wrong besides not being parity protected? sorry for the basic questions, but this is slightly out of my league. Additionally, I have checked the "parity is already valid', but it still says that 'All existing data on this device will be OVERWRITTEN when array is Started' at the top of the main page (corresponding to the 2 parity disks). I just want to be sure that the checkbox will be respected and no parity rebuild will occur. I plan to immediately start a non-correcting parity check to ensure that I have all disks assigned correctly.

Fixed this error

I also noticed it does not see any shares at all, /mnt is empty. This seems bad.

This morning I decided to upgrade my UnRAID OS version to 7.3.2 (or whatever the latest is). After updating all plugins, I updated the OS, and it seemed to go fine. A reboot was necessary to install the update, and here is where it all went sideways. The initial reboot attempts got stalled in some kind of endless boot loop. I stopped the server, replaced the flash drive files with the 'previous' folder full of files and rebooted. It appeared to start up fine but now I am not able to connect to the server in any way. I pinged the IP and there seems to be something responding. I can navigate the UnRAID file system from a monitor attached to the server, but that is the only sign of life. Can anyone offer some advice as to how to get access to it again? I was able run diagnostics which I have attached here. tower-diagnostics-20260803-0639.zip

Gotcha, thanks for taking time to help me out. So, I will unassign parity 2 regardless of whether I do a regular restart and sync, or start in maintenance and sync. Well, unassigning parity2 and adding the new disk as parity1 leads to an invalid configuration, so I guess I just assign the new disk, tick the maintenance mode box, and restart the array?

Sorry, I'm a bit confused. I've never really used maintenance mode. I can have the array offline, but how do you keep parity2 intact if it's removed for the sync. There seems to be something I'm missing, maybe it's the distinction between the disk used to store parity information (parity2 disk) vs the actual information (parity2). Sorry for the endless questions, but I don't want to do something stupid because my understanding is incorrect. Thanks for your patience.

So, circling back to my server issues. I am ready to add in the new the parity disk, but am a little worried about the Parity 2 disk (SMART errors) currently in the server. Is the best course of action to just allocate the new disk to parity, rebuild, and see what happens? I'm a bit afraid that the Parity 2 disk will be pulled out of service due to the errors. As I understand it the 2 parity disks are independent of each other so that even if that happens, I can just deallocate the Parity 2 and not have any issues with the new parity disk, or the array, aside from only having protection from one disk failure. Or, is there some other procedure I should follow to keep things efficient and safe? As always, I really appreciate the help here, as I can just think myself into circles due to incomplete knowledge. p.s. the other factor here is that I will be away from home for the next couple of months, so will not be able to physically lay hands on the server to do any more disk switching, etc... Perfect timing!

the test fails almost immediately with a read error 🤬 I guess I need to get the new disk added as parity and get another new replacement. Odd for the 2 parity disks to crap out almost simultaneously.

So, quick recap, Had a parity disk go belly up last week, then the flash drive died. Got the flash replaced and a new parity drive came today. Now, of course, I am seeing a bunch of pending sectors on the currently installed parity 2 disk. My question is what is the most efficient, and safest, way to get things back to normal. I assume I just need to pre clear the new disk, add it to the array as parity 1, and start a sync to calculate parity on the new disk as well as to see if the pending sectors on the parity 2 disk go away? What am I missing? Or, maybe do an extended SMART test, on parity 2, while the pre-clear is happening ?

Yeah, I followed the changing flash drive guide. Unfortunately, The flash drive was totally toast, so I couldn't copy it and my latest flash backup was too old to trust. However, I did have all the disk assignments, so recreating the array was trivial. Everything, array related, seems good at the moment. The thing I am struggling with now is getting Plex back in order, no easy feat, I will tell you, as I am switching docker containers, and it is not happy with the previous app data.

Yesterday, I had a parity disk die unceremoniously. Today, I woke up to a corrupt flash drive. I am about to replace it. Unfortunately, I cannot get any diagnostics, right now, as it is dead. 2 quick questions for those smarter than I, 1. any pitfalls to look out for when replacing the flash drive (I did read the docs about it) and, 2. could this have had any impact on yesterday's dead parity disk situation.

Thanks for making this clear