Hi,

 

I was running the Shrink Array process (from here) to zero an empty drive (disk 2) out then remove it. However just as the zeroing started, I noticed that another drive (disk 15) was showing as disabled ('a mandatory smart command failed'). I assumed that it was a glitch, something to do with unmounting / zeroing the initial drive, so I stopped the zeroing process, and rebooted the server. Unfortunately I rebooted without grabbing any logs so I don't have anything from when the error happened; I've attached the current diagnostics anyway.

 

The disabled drive is now reporting SMART normally, and showing no errors; however it is still in a disabled/emulated state. Also the drive I was zeroing, is showing as unmountable (because, I assume, it has been zeroed enough to wipe out the file system). I am reasonably confident all the drives are healthy, did a parity check a few days ago with no problems, and as of now none of the drives have any SMART errors. I also only upgraded to 6.9.2 from 6.8.3 earlier today but I assume that's not relevant.

 

But I'm not sure how I should proceed to restore things to health. Should i rebuild the disabled drive? I assume it will be out of sync now with parity since I was writing zeros to the initial drive when it became disabled. But - can I do this with that (empty) drive unmountable? Or should I start the zeroing process again, let that finish (30hrs or so), remove that drive, and then rebuild the emulated drive? Or of course, something else altogether.

 

Any advice gratefully recieved...

tower-diagnostics-20220304-1951.zip

Just an update on this; the disabled drive appears to be healthy and to have all the data intact (I've been able to mount it and browse the files with the array stopped). If so, probably the best plan will be to do a new configuration and rebuild parity? Specifically :

 

Stop Array

New config ; preserve current assignments

Unassign the empty/unmountable disk (that I want to remove anyway)

Do nothing with the disabled drive (that I think is fine in terms of data)

start the array, which will rebuild parity. 

 

Does that sound reasonable? I'm happy to try and rebuild the data drive first (onto itself) but I don't know if that will work with an unmountable drive as well

Diags are after rebooting, so we can't see what happened, probably a problem with the SAS2LP since they are known to drop disks without a reason and the disk looks healthy.

 

10 hours ago, Shamutanti said:

Does that sound reasonable?

It does to me.

 

Thanks Jorge,

 

I'm rebuilding parity now, seems to be going smoothly. I checked the cabling and the latch on that particular SATA connector wasn't clicking, so I've swapped that one to the drive I'm removing and ordered a replacement. I'll report back if any further problems crop up.