Parity drive and data drive giving me trouble


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I have a small server running unRAID 6.0 rc4. I have a 3TB WD drive for parity and 3 data drives. This morning I tried to save a file to the server but couldn't access it. I went to the webgui where I encountered an invalid parity. I shut the system down to check cables and such. When I brought the system back up I noticed it took a lot longer than usual and saw some errors for one of my data drives during boot. When the webgui finally appeared it said the data drive was unmounted and parity invalid. I shut the system down again and reseated all cables to all the drives. During the boot process I noted similar errors and a longer time to boot. I decided to check the disk in maintenance mode and it says the superblock read failed, fatal error -- Input/output error. I also still have an invalid parity. So what should I do next? Is there any other info I need to provide? I have attached a screenshot of the main tab.

unRAID Main 2022-06-17.png

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You should really update Unraid, you're running an ancient release, much more difficult to look at the diags.

 

Both parity and disk1 are failing, so some data loss might be inevitable, suggest cloning disk1 to a new disk with ddrescue to try and recover as much data as possible and add a new parity drive, alternatively use a new disk1 and parity to rebuild the array than see what you can copy from old disk1 using the UD plugin to mount it.

 

 

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OK, so what's the best way to go about this? Fix the drive issue first, then upgrade Unraid? Or update Unraid first? What is involved in upgrading from such an old version? I'm thinking about upgrading the hardware on this server as well. Should I get the system back up and running before moving to newer hardware?

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OK. I ordered 2 new drives that should be here later today. But now I have another problem. I went to the plugins page to check for updates. And now the web gui is completely blank except for the tabs. Doesn't matter what I click on I get no info below the tabs. I tried rebooting, but the same thing occurs.

 

 

Annotation 2022-06-17 102843.png

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Did any disks ever get mounted in those diagnostics? Nothing to go on really except syslog which was full of disk errors. Just wondering what filesystem being used on that very old version.

 

37 minutes ago, In2Photos said:

What is involved in upgrading from such an old version?

Probably best to just do a new install, keeping your license .key file and super.dat (disk assignments).

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23 minutes ago, trurl said:

Just make sure you don't assign any data disk to any parity slot.

Got it. I also think I will remove the 500 GB drive from the array as I don't need it anymore with the replacement drive (1.5TB bad drive and 500 GB good drive replaced by new 3TB drive). I also only have 4 SATA ports on this old machine so in order to try and recover the files from the 1.5TB drive I need a free port. Here's the way I'm thinking of doing this.

 

Install 2 new drives and the 2 good drives (3-3TB and 1-500GB)

Assign 1 new drive as parity and the other as a data drive

Rebuild the array and parity

Remove the 500GB drive using the method described here (clear drive then remove drive): https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

Install the 1.5TB bad drive and try to recover files using ddrescue

Remove the 1.5TB drive

 

 

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After reading about ddrescue I see that what I planned to do will not be best since I need to clone the disk before it goes into the array. Instead I guess I need to do the following:

 

Install 1 new drive in place of the parity drive

Clone the 1.5 TB drive to this new drive.

Install the other new drive and assign as parity and the other as a data drive

Rebuild the array and parity

Remove the 500GB drive using the method described here (clear drive then remove drive): https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

 

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2 hours ago, In2Photos said:

Rebuild the array and parity

Remove the 500GB drive using the method described here (clear drive then remove drive): https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

I usually recommend the other method of shrinking the array (rebuild parity without the disk). It is simpler and more reliable. And since you are going to rebuild parity anyway, just remove that drive before rebuilding parity.

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5 minutes ago, In2Photos said:

Rebuild the array and parity

Remove the 500GB drive using the method described here (clear drive then remove drive): https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

Those two steps sort of cancel each other out. If the 500GB drive is already empty (pre-requisite of the clear drive part) then you should just rebuild parity without the 500GB drive.

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