Unexpected results upgrading healthy data drive under 6.9.0

[bland328]

tl;dr: Why am I being asked to re-provide my encryption key when upgrading a data drive?

 

I've been an Unraid user since version 2013, and understand quite a bit about how and why Unraid does what it does. Today, however, I'm confused, and can't figure out if Unraid is doing something unexpected, or if I'm being dense, since I haven't replaced a drive in a couple years.

 

I'm replacing a healthy 4TB drive with a new 8TB drive, so I stopped the array, set the 4TB drive to "no device," shut the system down, swapped out the old drive for the new, powered up again, and selected the new 8TB drive to replace the now-missing 4TB.

 

Off to the right of the newly-selected 8TB drive, it now says "All existing data on this device will be OVERWRITTEN when array is Started", and immediately below it says "Wrong" and displays the identifier for the old 4TB drive; this all seems right to me.

 

Near the bottom of the page, it says "STOPPED: REPLACEMENT DISK INSTALLED" to the left of the Start button and "Start will start Parity-Sync and/or Data-Rebuild" to the right; this also seems right to me.

 

However, here's the parts I don't get:

 

The Start button is disabled, and there's no "yes, I want to do this" checkbox of any kind to enable it, which may be related to the "Encryption status: Enter new key" message appearing below the Maintenance Mode checkbox.

 

Though I do use encrypted XFS for my data drives, I don't understand Unraid wanting a new encryption key for two reasons:

 

1. /root/keyfile already exists.
2. Why would Unraid need an encryption key for a disk that I gather is about to be overwritten on a sector-by-sector basis, rather than being formatted? And if the answer is that new disks always get reformatted before rebuilding...well...okay, but why isn't the existing /root/keyfile being used?

 

I don't recall having to re-supply the encryption key in the past, so I figured I'd check in here before moving forward and potentially doing something unfortunate. Thanks for any insight!

 

EDIT:

I pasted the phrase from my /root/keyfile in as a "new" passphrase, and it worked; Parity-Sync/Data-Rebuild is now running.

 

However, I'd still appreciate any insight as to why this was necessary, so I can decide whether to submit a 6.9.0 bug report or a simply a feature request to improve this experience.

Edited March 8, 2021 by bland328