I've had an issue where I have been unable to replace a drive in the array as I had two failures - basically the array couldn't start when i replace any drive.  I put the failed drive back in so that I could get the array back up and running then transferred all data off to external drives and now I want to replace all the drives starting from scratch.  Current array looks like this:

 

 

Disk 3 failed - for some reason disk 9 is also disk 3! (i.e. if I take the 2 TB out, replace it with a new drive and assign it to disk 3 I get errors, array won't start.

 

Disk 9 is starting to fail, disk 3 failed a while back.

 

I want to remove all drives and replace them so I end up with Disk 1 thru 6 all being 8tb WD Reds, keeping the original 8tb parity drive too.  I also want to retain the 500gb SSD I have as a cache.  All data is now off of the machine.

 

I do have user accounts (ftp) on the machine that I'd like to keep but not important if I have to lose them.  What woudl you say is the best way forward for me?

8 minutes ago, Starteck2002 said:

I want to remove all drives and replace them so I end up with Disk 1 thru 6 all being 8tb WD Reds, keeping the original 8tb parity drive too.  I also want to retain the 500gb SSD I have as a cache.  All data is now off of the machine.

Taking just this info from you that I quoted, the way to accomplish this is to go to tools, and do new config. That will allow you to change any assignments you want, and will overwrite any drive assigned to parity slot(s) and leave the data drive slots content untouched. Any new drives you add will need to be formatted after the array is started with the new configuration.

 

 

Thank you for that simple advice 🙂  I presume this will require that I either move or wipe the parity drive so Unraid doesn't attempt to rebuild data?

12 minutes ago, Starteck2002 said:

I presume this will require that I either move or wipe the parity drive so Unraid doesn't attempt to rebuild data?

No.

Excellent 🙂  

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply 🙂