Hi guys! This is my first post & apologize a) for the length & b) for the likely large amount of mistakes I committed today. The main one being multiple reboots without saving syslogs – I’ve since read that this is probably my demise.
I got unRAID up & running last night & was happy with it, just threw on a few gigs of test stuff in a few different shares & created the primary users. Today was going to be spent doing The Big Transfer, buuuut I’ll sum the issue up in dot point:
(2x WD Red 4TB drives, one parity, one disk. 120GB SSD for cache & Sandisk Cruzer USB connected directly to the motherboard as recommended.)
While moving files from an external HDD (using Unassigned Devices & Krusader), I paused the transfer with the Krusader GUI.
Krusader froze, & then the unRAID GUI also became unresponsive. I waited over half an hour but could get no response from either.
Fearing the HDDs may be encountering errors & leaving it longer may be damaging them (plus feeling hopeless after half an hour of nothing), I force restarted the PC.
Back up, Disk 1 had the red cross next to it & was being emulated.
I was fairly sure the data was still there. I removed Disk 1 & tried attaching it as an unassigned device & also to a Linux VM on my main machine – neither would read. This turned out to be due to my cheap ‘SATA to USB’ cable I’m pretty sure, but I’ve included this step just in case.
With the parity seemingly fine & all files still accessible, I tried rebuilding by unassigning & reassigning Disk 1, stopping & restarting the array in between.
This kicked off alright, but at ~0.6 percent, hit a read error on Disk 1 & aborted itself. I tried this a couple of times.
I found a forum post saying to check the SATA cable – though it had failed before this, I HAD played with it, so made sure everything was snug.
Same result.
I tried rebooting a few times, beating my head against a wall. Weird things were happening. Both Disk 1 AND the parity drive would randomly appear as unassigned devices as if they were external. The mount option was there, but did nothing.
After awhile, it got to the point where both Disk 1 & parity were simply not recognized. The flash & cache drives were both fine. Note that despite the parity acting up in different ways, I had never really done anything with it.
Frustrated as all hell, I unplugged the SATA & power cables from the cache SSD & plugged them into the parity drive. Booting up, the parity is now apparently fine & dandy, AND Disk 1 is being recognized again, but still with the red cross. The cache is currently not connected at all.
I’ve gone from working happily to seemingly having lost the ability to read the 2 hard drives & everything in between today, so figured with the parity alright & Disk 1 at least being recognized, I should turn to the forums. I imagine all the fooling around I did was dumb before asking you guys, but I’ve never really had trouble I couldn’t fix myself until now. Every time I rebooted (except for that one fateful hard boot), I stopped the array & used the proper shutdown procedure.
Also note the machine is headless – I can SSH into it, so I guess it’s not a problem. I just really really don’t want to have to pull the GPU out of my main PC & stick it in this one again, so hopefully it’s nothing in the BIOS haha.
Anyway, sorry for the long post, thanks a lot for reading! Let me know if you have any suggestions
Edit: Couldn't help myself, rejiggered the cabling & attached the cache SSD. All drives showing fine except Disk 1. Would possibly the easiest way of fixing this/determining whether there's something wrong with the HDD itself just be to format it using Preclear or something?