Unmountable: not mounted when trying to re-enable a drive


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A bit more background on why you were trying the rebuild might help and what lead up to it might help with giving guidance.   It the disk was being emulated and showing as 'unmountable' before you started the rebuild then it will still show this state afterwards. 

 

Handling of 'unmountable' disks is covered here  in the online documentation that can be accessed via the Manual link at the bottom of the unraid GUI.

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The disk wasn't unmountable until after I followed the instruction linked in my original post from the wiki, just as disabled.

 

I followed the instructions from the wiki:

Quote

Re-enable the drive

Okay, you are sure the drive is good, but the cable was loose, or the port was bad, or the controller crashed, or you think the failure was a fluke ( note: it is NEVER a fluke )- how can I get unRAID to reuse this same disk that it has disabled?

If you are sure that the drive is fine, and the SMART report confirms it, then you will want to re-enable the drive, and return it to service. There are 2 ways to do it. Remember however that while the first way is quick, there may have been writes to the drive, including the write that failed and caused the red ball. Those writes went to the emulated drive, not the physical drive, so by far the best and safest option is the second way, to rebuild the drive onto itself, writing the up-to-date emulated drive to the physical drive.

If you are absolutely certain that you have not written to the drive since it was taken off-line, then you can use the Trust My Array procedure (for v4 and v5), to quickly recover your drive and the array to an all green condition. Remember, it was taken out of service when a "write" to it failed so using the "trust" procedure will effectively forget the data written while the drive was disabled.

Unless you are certain you have not written to the disk, a rebuild (reconstruction) is much better. The safest option is to reconstruct the drive. Only use the Trust procedure if a reconstruction is not possible.

You can re-enable the hard drive and reconstruct it as follows:

Stop the array.

Go to the Main page (Devices in version 4.7) and unassign the disk.

Go to the Main page (Array Operations section) and start the array.

Stop the array again.

Go to the Main page (Devices in version 4.7) and re-assign the disk.

Go to the Main page (Array Operations section) - the system should indicate there is a "new" drive to replace the disabled one. Check the confirmation box and click the Start button to start a reconstruct/rebuild of the disk.

The last part that I bolded I didn't get to do, as soon as I started the array it only offered me the choice to format or rebuild parity, so I chose rebuild parity.

Edited by dodgypast
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9 minutes ago, dodgypast said:

The last part that I bolded I didn't get to do, as soon as I started the array it only offered me the choice to format or rebuild parity, so I chose rebuild parity.

 

Do you mean rebuild parity or rebuild the data drive?  If the data drive was showing as unmountable at that point then the rebuild would also result in an unmountabje drive.  The correct way to fix an umountable drive is to run a file system check/repair.   Ideally this is done on the 'emulated' drive before doing a rebuild so that you still have the original drive unchanged if needed for any data recovery attempt.

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