Failing drive - format before replacing?

[darksupernova]

Hi there,

 

I'm sure this has been answered before. I apologise if I missed something, the topics I found had just enough nuance to dissuade me from trying just in case it went wrong. 

 

I have a drive that is failing and I would like to replace it with a new drive. I want to format the old drive before it goes in the bin. I don't have enough cabling to plug in any additional drives (therefore cannot have the old drive and new drive both connected). I am aware that I can simply unplug it and plug in a new drive to rebuild it (from parity). Question is, can I format the old drive before taking it out without losing the data on the parity disks or effecting the rebuild process for the new drive in anyway?

 

What do you recommend?

 

Thanks,

 

Max

[JorgeB]

11 minutes ago, darksupernova said:

Question is, can I format the old drive before taking it out without losing the data on the parity disks or effecting the rebuild process for the new drive in anyway?

Not while it's still assigned to the array, you can unassign it, start the array without it then format the device directly (not the emulated disk) with UD or using the CLI.

[darksupernova]

Ah that makes sense - I forgot I could run with an emulated disk while formatting it. 

 

This worked like a charm thank you

[JonathanM]

4 hours ago, darksupernova said:

. I want to format the old drive before it goes in the bin.

Keep in mind "format" just writes a new blank table of contents, the files on the drive are still there and readable with recovery software.