Cancel parity drive rebuild to save other drive?

[pulseOXE]

I'm in a nasty situation with Unraid. I've been plagued by no free space messages that I think is from a disk formatting bug. In an effort to try to fix these, I decided my best option was to use UnBalance to move the data from one of the disks that needed formatted, then change the format twice to wipe the disk. I thought that this wouldn't trigger a Parity rebuild of the disk since it had no data when I wiped it. This does not seem to be the case, and it is trying to rebuild parity on the disk.. (this was disk8)

This has led me to another HUGE problem. During parity rebuild of the drive (which again, I don't think needs to or should even happen) my Disk5 is just erroring out like crazy. This disk has only been in use for a few months and has never been an issue so seeing it throw thousands of errors is throwing me for a loop. Also, I try to look at the system log, and I get this: "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 134062112 bytes) in /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/dynamix/include/Syslog.php on line 18"

 

Is there some way to say that Drive8 should be empty, and then like wipe Disk5 and do a Parity rebuild of 5? I assume that's not possible with a single parity drive, but I don't know what other options I have if any. 

I've taken the array totally offline for now, and am a bit lost as to next steps and trying to figure out where to go from here. Sorry if the post is confusing, it's hard to articulate how bad I screwed up

 

 

[itimpi]

8 minutes ago, pulseOXE said:

then change the format twice to wipe the disk. I thought that this wouldn't trigger a Parity rebuild of the disk since it had no data when I wiped it. This does not seem to be the case, and it is trying to rebuild parity on the disk.. (this was disk8)

It should not trigger a parity rebuild unless something happened as formatting is just treated like ay other write operation.   This suggests something else must have happened as well.

 

12 minutes ago, pulseOXE said:

Is there some way to say that Drive8 should be empty, and then like wipe Disk5 and do a Parity rebuild of 5? I assume that's not possible with a single parity drive, but I don't know what other options I have if any

Unfortunately it is not that simple as even an empty disk is not all zeros and its contents are included in any parity calculations as parity works at the raw sector level.

 

I suggest you post your system's diagnostics zip file to see if we can figure out from it exactly what has happened and this the best way forward.

[pulseOXE]

tower-diagnostics-20220816-0959.zipDiagnostics attached,

[JorgeB]

Like mentioned just formatting a disk won't trigger a rebuild, but since the diags are after rebooting we cannot see what happened, disk5 errors are not logged as a disk problem and SMART looks fine, check/replace cables (both) or slot and try the rebuild again.

[pulseOXE]

Got it. I just swapped some cables to try it after reading another one of your posts JorgeB, and no errors so far, so fingers crossed.

Assuming everything works - I'm getting this error on multiple disks: "Tower root: xfs_growfs: XFS_IOC_FSGROWFSDATA xfsctl failed: No space left on device"
I assume the only way to fix this is to format the offending drives. Assuming that's true, I want to systematically format all of my drives one by one without losing data. 

What is the best way to do this? Unbalance to shift data, then what? I want to make sure I'm formatting these disks the right way so I don't have to do a parity rebuild every time.

[JorgeB]

That's from a bug a few releases ago, you need to empty the disk(s) with unbalance or manually, re-format and copy the data back, it won't require a rebuild.

[pulseOXE]

That's exactly what I was trying to do that caused this mess in the first place and for some reason it is trying to do a rebuild. Do you have the link to those instructions handy? I want to make sure I'm following the right steps on re-do since I must have screwed something up.

[JorgeB]

30 minutes ago, pulseOXE said:

Do you have the link to those instructions handy?

-Stop the array, click on the now empty disk and change filesystem to reiserfs.

-Start array, format the disk

-Stop array, click on the same disk and change the fs back to xfs

-Start array, format the disk

-Done

[trurl]

1 hour ago, pulseOXE said:

for some reason it is trying to do a rebuild

Maybe you unassigned/reassigned the disk?