I thought the formatting message should go away after awhile.  It's many hours and it's still showing, the parity disk is still being written to but all the other drives are being read from.  

 

 

 

It looks like your building parity. This will take many hours.

I thought the formatting message should go away after awhile.  It's many hours and it's still showing, the parity disk is still being written to but all the other drives are being read from.  

 

 

 

Is that a brand new array?  Did you add all those disks at once? 

 

Please attach a system log to your next post.  You might be still formatting if a deadlock of some type occurred.

 

Joe L.

I have noticed that trying to format a large number of drives at once can cause the deadlock JoeL is talking about.  I believe Rajahal had a similar problem a while back.

 

I usually assign 2 drives to the array, format them, rinse and repeat, then add the parity drive.  It takes a little longer doing it that way... but I don't have any problems.

Yep, I have seen this to.  However, the parity build should be able to still complete without errors.  In the past I have just let the parity build finish and then rebooted the server.  Sometimes the disks will show up as formatted, sometimes you will need to format them again.

 

Or you can do them a few at a time as prostuff suggested.  You can also do them a few at a time via the command line if you don't want to keep rebooting over and over.

Here's the syslog Joe.  At this point all the drives are spun down (including the parity).  Yes, I add them all at once.  Until now I didn't see any reason not to.  I'm going to reboot and see what their status is.

syslog.zip

Wow! Could 1,063 instances of cache_dirs have anything to do with it?

Wow! Could 1,063 instances of cache_dirs have anything to do with it?

I did not count them, but I doubt it had anything to do with it as it kept putting itself back in the "at" queue.

 

Why it is even running on a new array, that I cannot answer.

 

However, I saw no record of mkreiserfs at all being invoked.  Almost looks like the "format" did not occur at all (or was not logged)

 

It will be interesting to see if the disks were formatted.

 

Joe L.

I now know exactly what happened.  Simple mistake.  When you stick a bunch of drives in a new system and the parity drive is assigned then it starts doing a parity sync.  I needed to stop the sync before checking the format checkbox and clicking the format button.  

 

You know it might just be a nice feature if it wouldn't allow the user to attempt to format while a sync is in progress.  

 

I rebooted and started it up again but this time using what I like to call - the right way.  All good now.

 

As to Joe's question...no they weren't formatted.  Basically nothing happens to the data drives but the parity disk continues to be written to.  

I now know exactly what happened.  Simple mistake.  When you stick a bunch of drives in a new system and the parity drive is assigned then it starts doing a parity sync.  I needed to stop the sync before checking the format checkbox and clicking the format button.  

 

You know it might just be a nice feature if it wouldn't allow the user to attempt to format while a sync is in progress.  

 

I rebooted and started it up again but this time using what I like to call - the right way.  All good now.

 

As to Joe's question...no they weren't formatted.  Basically nothing happens to the data drives but the parity disk continues to be written to.  

I don't think you needed to cancel the parity calc in order to press the format button and format the disks.  the two operations can occur at the same time.

I have formatted drives many times during a parity sync. Really no different than writing to the array. But I always give the parity sync a chance to get a few % into the build and verify the speed is reasonable before pressing format.

I now know exactly what happened.  Simple mistake.  When you stick a bunch of drives in a new system and the parity drive is assigned then it starts doing a parity sync.  I needed to stop the sync before checking the format checkbox and clicking the format button.  

 

You know it might just be a nice feature if it wouldn't allow the user to attempt to format while a sync is in progress.  

 

I rebooted and started it up again but this time using what I like to call - the right way.  All good now.

 

As to Joe's question...no they weren't formatted.  Basically nothing happens to the data drives but the parity disk continues to be written to.  

I don't think you needed to cancel the parity calc in order to press the format button and format the disks.  the two operations can occur at the same time.

 

No, it caused the hang.  Stopping the sync I was able to format 6 drives at once.