[SOLVED] New Config Tool / Removing a Drive


NVS1

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I've tried doing a bit of research on this already, and I think I understand what I need to do, but I'm also a bit paranoid of doing something wrong and losing all my data. 

 

I currently have a system with a single parity drive (10tb), 4 data drives (2x10tv, 6tb and 3tb). and a Cache drive.

 

Just this morning I woke up to my find my array was down, and it appears that my 3tb drive has failed. 

 

Although I have an extra 12tb and a 14tb drive that I've yet to install, I can't install those yet as I was originally planning on tossing the 14tb in as a new parity drive, and I obviously can't do that right now. 

 

So, I have enough space on my system where without the 3tb drive being replaced, I would still have room to spare. I've physically removed the drive and disconnected it from the system, and upon booting up, the UnRaid system still believes it's there of course. I can force to start the array, and it just tells me it's emulated, but again it notifies me that the disk is missing.

 

It appears that I need to go through and run the tool New Config, and tell it to preserve my Parity, and Cache drive, while not preserving my Data drives (I hope this is correct?).

 

At this point I have not come across any videos or images of what the next step looks like.. at least not on this version of UnRaid (v6.8.3). From what I can tell, the next step is going to allow me to pick which drives I wish to preserve (or do I need to tell the system to preserve all Parity, Data, and Cache drives?). I can then choose my 2x10tb and the 6tb and just forget about the 3tb. From there it'll rebuild the array without the 3tb, and it'll be back to business as usual.

 

If there's any other important information that might be needed, let me know, but I'm more so posting this as a sanity check before I dive in and potentially destroy my array/data.

 

Thanks!

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21 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Have you backed up the data that is on the emulated 3TB?

If you do a new config, all data that was on that drive will be irretrievably erased.

No, I can't because that drive has failed. It's inoperable (doesn't even show in BIOS). I understand that normally you'd swap a failed drive out for a fresh drive, but I don't have that ability at this time. My only option is to install a 12tb or 14tb, but because my parity is only 10tb, that drive will be capped to 10tb.

 

So since I have around ~8tb of free unused space on my array (prior to this failure), I was thinking it'd just be easier to remove the 3tb drive all together. I'll still have space, and then my parity can rebuild the array with only 3 data drives (instead of the 4). 

 

Again, I don't want to lose whatever data is on the 3tb. Was hoping that the parity would be able to rebuild the missing data and spread that across the remaining space on the other 3 drives.

Edited by NVS1
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16 minutes ago, NVS1 said:

Was hoping that the parity would be able to rebuild the missing data and spread that across the remaining space on the other 3 drives.

Parity doesn't work that way, it has no information about individual files, only entire drives.

 

The 3TB drive showing as emulated is what parity is doing, it emulates missing drives so you can access the data on them, or rebuild to a new drive.

 

18 minutes ago, NVS1 said:

I understand that normally you'd swap a failed drive out for a fresh drive, but I don't have that ability at this time. My only option is to install a 12tb or 14tb, but because my parity is only 10tb, that drive will be capped to 10tb.

That's what the parity swap procedure I posted is for.

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7 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Parity doesn't work that way, it has no information about individual files, only entire drives.

 

The 3TB drive showing as emulated is what parity is doing, it emulates missing drives so you can access the data on them, or rebuild to a new drive.

 

That's what the parity swap procedure I posted is for.

Gotcha. That makes sense then.

 

As for the parity swap... so if I'm reading this right, even given my current situation with a failed drive, I can still upgrade my parity and replace the dead disk in one go? I was under the impression that more or less I need to fix this dead disk issue, and then once fixed, I can then upgrade my parity, but I wouldn't be able to do both at the same time...

 

Currently where I'm at right now, my setup looks like this:

image.png.04e362aef3a3906083cebc233f90c305.png

 

I did start the array and then stopped it after I saw it was emulating the drive and not attempting to do any rebuild. So it seems as though I've covered the first 6 steps from that link you provided.

 

From there I'm just supposed to toss in my 14tb drive into the bay that previously housed my 3tb. Boot up the system... it says to stop the array, but I believe that UnRaid won't even start the array in this situation will it? If so I guess I'll stop it anyways. 


From here I'm going to unassign my existing parity drive, and then assign the new 14tb drive as the lone parity drive, and then assign my existing 10tb parity as the Disk 3 data drive. 


From there I can choose to follow the copy command and so forth...

 

I know this sounds redundant, but I just want to ensure before I start stripping out my parity, and doing all that, that the idea behind this all is to ensure I don't lose any data whatsoever. Following these steps here (as I laid out / what's laid out in that link), will simply upgrade my existing parity from 10tb -> 14tb, while replacing the 3tb with a 10tb drive, and rebuild the entire parity, and I should have no data loss anywhere, right?

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43 minutes ago, NVS1 said:

toss in my 14tb drive into the bay that previously housed my 3tb. Boot up the system

Doesn't matter which bay anything is in, just the slots they are assigned to. Assign old parity as disk 3 and new parity as parity. It will copy old parity to new with the array offline and when copy completes it will let you rebuild disk 3.

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So, I'm reviving this topic a bit here... I've done the parity swap, it recently just finished copying the contents of the one parity over to the next, and I've now started the array and it's going through attempting to do a Parity-Sync/Data-Rebuild... the problem is that it keeps pausing itself every ~2minutes. I have no idea why it pauses. I can click Resume, and it'll continue for another couple minutes, then pause again. 

image.thumb.png.304ca1215e8048751e743924adc8f4a5.png

 

I really don't want to be sitting here for 20 hours clicking Resume every couple minutes.

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I think I just figured out what was happening. I have Parity Check Tuning installed, and it was configured to pause the parity check when it was within 3 degrees below the warning disk temperature threshold. The warning threshold was at 45, and you can see even in my screenshot the parity drive was at 41c. 

 

Makes sense since these two drives have been running nonstop for the past 30 hours. 

 

I've inched that warning temp up to 50, and will keep an eye on it and see where it goes from there. 

 

Edit: Just grabbed the syslog file and I see parity drive temp warnings in there and the pause state being enabled. Sure looks to be it.

Edited by NVS1
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@itimpi I did, but I think the notification details were stripped down so it was just giving me generic details with no real information...

 

 

Running into another issue now though... During this rebuild process I've had my system do a hard reset about 5x now. Each time it does this, it's completely reset all rebuild progress and starts back over with an estimated 16 hour rebuild time and 0% progress... Just recently it was at about 55% and then I got a notification about the restart, and sure enough it's back to 0% and only been running for 5 minutes.

 

Now after this latest reset I see the following:

image.thumb.png.d790eeae06ea8a34fb382b953022779c.png

 

I've not seen that warning about an unmountable disk before... I assume it's because it was the one being written to and getting in sync and now it's corrupted due to the restart, but I have no idea.

 

Unfortunately after restarts the syslog gets completely cleared so I'm not sure how to tell what's going on. 

 

I've not had any issues with restarts, or anything until this one disk failed, and this just seems to have caused a rolling shitshow of one issue after the issue now.

 

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If your system is doing a hard reset then you have a hardware problem of some sort.    With hardware resets any array operation will always restart from the beginning so you are going to need to get to the bottom of what is causing the resets.  
 

Things that spring to mind to check are that the power supply is OK and up to handling the current drive configuration, and also that the CPU cooling i(fan) is working.   Others may have other ideas to suggest.

 

 

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I suspected a hardware issue of sorts, but unsure what exactly could be the cause of it.. I do have a spare PSU I could toss in. Can't recall what size of PSU I have in there right now, but I know it's SeaSonic, and if I had to guess it'd be a 550w Gold. I'll have to take a look in the morning as it's currently setup out in my detached garage.

 

I did end up running a memtest which it passed without issues, and I ended up putting some new thermal paste on as well as it had been several years since it was applied. We'll see if it continues to run overnight.. if not I'll double check the PSU, but I don't think I've ever purchased anything less than 550watts.

 

For the record, my system from what I recall is the following:

 

Gigabyte H97N-WIFI

Intel I5 4460 @ 3.2ghz (not OCed)

16gb DDR3 Memory

 

You can already see my drive configuration in the details above. 

 

That all aside... I've been meaning to setup a new system, and have an R720 that is currently sitting unused... Has everything except for drives.... How does UnRaid handle hardware swaps like that? If I were to yank all the drives, the USB flash drive and all that fun stuff, could I just toss it all in that R720 and make sure the drive configuration is the same when I boot it all up? I know Windows would throw a fit, and am actually unsure how Linux would handle something like that. Unsure what to expect with Unraid.

 

Edit: I know this is just an estimate and far from real world application, but tossed all that into PCPartPicker and it comes up with an estimated 217watt usage. Well below the likely 550watt PSU that I would have, still well below even if I happened to have a 450watt one.

 

I don't have a video card, or sound card. Don't run VM's, etc.

Edited by NVS1
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7 hours ago, NVS1 said:

I did, but I think the notification details were stripped down so it was just giving me generic details with no real information

Not directly relevant to your current problem, but I did identify an issue in the parity check tuning plugin running on 6.8.3 where notifications issued by the plugin would not get the description field displayed giving more detail on the notification.  
 

Unfortunately in one of the recent plugin upgrades I made use of a new option introduced when sending notifications in the 6.9.0 releases and missed the fact it broke the display of the description field on 6.8.3.    Will be fixed in the upgrade I plan to release before the New Year.

7 hours ago, NVS1 said:

've not seen that warning about an unmountable disk before... I assume it's because it was the one being written to and getting in sync and now it's corrupted due to the restart, but I have no idea.

You might want to look here in the online documentation that is accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the Unraid GUI.

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So, I've had some success!

 

My latest parity rebuild was finally successful after I had ran the memtest (no errors), and re-applied a fresh coat of thermal paste. Not sure if I got lucky, or maybe the CPU was running warm and that was causing issues.

 

That all aside, after the parity check finished, I still had the unmountable disk issue to resolve. I was able to run the xfs_repair tool, and ran that with the -L flag to destroy the log file, and allow it to fix the filesystem. After that was done, I was able to restart the array normally and everything appears to be back up and running

 

Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions as I worked through this.

 

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!

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  • JorgeB changed the title to [SOLVED] New Config Tool / Removing a Drive

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