First: I already searched the this forum and I can't relate to any of the previous post on the topic.

One of my HDD died, I RMA'ed it and got a new one (same make/model). I received the replacement part and now, I can't re-add to my array..

1. Unraid detects the drive, so I add it back in the position of the missing drive. At this stage, I see my Disk 4 is "Not installed" and a Dev 1 disk is Unassigned (the new disk without FS).

2. I must stop the array, to add the disk.

3. I select my unassigned disk to Disk 4, then click "Start" on the array.

4. The drive is added, but I get a message telling the disk is unmountable and I have the option the format the disk. When I click "Yes", through the warning, the drive seems to starts formatting, but it does not. I get back the the GUI with the same state.

Is there any way I could look to see if the problem is hardware or software related?  At this point, I have no clue where to look.


 

Could I do some equivalent commands in the CLI to format the new HDD?

Some other test I did: I changed the physical connection within my computer. Swapping disks on the controllers. But, no matter what I try to it does not seems Unraid can format the disk using the GUI.

Here is my current state. This may gives clue to people that would like to help me.

Basically replaced WD-PURZ with another WD-PURZ.  I expected the system to automatically "recreate/read" the drive without any intervention. This disk "died", so I wasn't able to do a proper shutdown/removal of the array. I followed these steps the best I could.

 

 

39 minutes ago, LEKO said:

The drive is added, but I get a message telling the disk is unmountable and I have the option the format the disk. When I click "Yes", through the warning, the drive seems to starts formatting, but it does not. I get back the the GUI with the same state.

This is exactly the wrong thing to do as the warning stated.   It results in all data on the drive being lost.

 

The correct handling of unmountable drives is covered here in the online documentations accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI.

 

2 minutes ago, itimpi said:

This is exactly the wrong thing to do as the warning stated.   It results in all data on the drive being lost.

 

The correct handling of unmountable drives is covered here in the online documentations accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI.

 

I'll look at this document...  And try to understand how/if I can mount this replacement disk.

By the way, I didn't blindly clicked on the the format button, is just that nothing was going on with the array. And this particular disk was filled at 1% only before it crashed.

@itimpi: I'm sort of confused... It's a new disk, so there is no FS on it. I may have a big misunderstanding of how Unraid works, but Unraid should be able to auto-fix this. A disk died, I put a replacement (unformatted) drive of the same or bigger size and the magic should happen.

I honestly don't know which part of the document you shared I should follow to try to make my new drive working or to understand if it's an hardware or a software issue. I may have a DOA, but how I can tell?

The link I gave was to the ‘unmountable disk’ section.   

 

The rebuild process would have handled any partitioning/formatting.    When you did a manual format this over-rode the automatic process and told Unraid to create an empty file system on the disk and update parity to reflect this.

 

I suspect if you reboot you will find the disk has been reformatted, but You are likely to get better informed feedback if you post your system’s diagnostics zip file.

 

 

 

@itimpi: Humm... I do really suspect a DOA drives. No matter what I try to do, I just can't get anything from Unraid. And I just noticed the SMART reports already contains errors for a drive that is only a couple hours old, this is suspicious.

Just now, LEKO said:

@itimpi: Humm... I do really suspect a DOA drives. No matter what I try to do, I just can't get anything from Unraid. And I just noticed the SMART reports already contains errors for a drive that is only a couple hours old, this is suspicious.

Yes, definitely possible.  You should at least post the SMART report for the drive if not the full diagnostics (which includes the SMART information as part of the content.

 

@itimpi: Here it is... I already have opened a ticket with Western Digital.

And frankly, I don't think I have break anything in Unraid. The GUI still mention that I have 27.9GB of data on the "phantom/missing" drive. Crossing fingers.

tower-diagnostics-20220209-1516.zip