BUG? Or stupid? Screwed up adding three disks at once!

Raki72 · November 14, 2022

Hi,

my server allows up to 24 HDDs. Currently I use 21 of the HDD slots: 2 parity drives and 19 data drives.

Now I had the idea to add 3 more drives (Disk 20, 21 and 22) at the same time and something went wrong. What happend?

1. after adding the three HDDs, I received the normal message that new devices have been discovered and need to be cleared first. This was done without any problem.

2. next step was to shut down the array, assign the 3 new drives to the array and start up the array again.

3. now I got the message that the drives must be formatted. I acknowledged this and the formatting started.

4. for whatever reason the formating went wrong because one drive (drive 20) showed multiple sector errors. Now I had my old array with 21 HDDs plus 3 drives that showed "unmountable: unsupported partition layout".

5. I removed Disk 20, that had errors, and started the array again. Now Disk 20 showed as being emulated although there never was any data on it. Disk 21 and 22 still showed "unmountable: unsupported partition layout", so I tried to format them.

6. the format stopped after some minutes without error message.

7. I removed Disk 21 from the array. Disk 20 and 21 now are shown as emulated although there never was any data or any parity build for them.

8. Disk 22 is now the only new HDD in the existing array (Disk 1-19) but it shows "unmountable: unsupported partition layout" again. When trying to Format Disk 22, the format command stops immediately.

The "old" array (Disk 1-19) is still working fine and no data is lost. But now I have the old array plus two drives (Disk 20 and 21) that I removed and that are now emulated and Disk 22 that is still in the server but I cannot format.

I think, the best way to solve this issue would be to get rid of Disk 20, 21 and 22 assigned to the array and then add them disk by disk (instead of all at once). But does anybody know, how I can delete Disk 20, 21 and 22 from the array without losing any data?

Thanks for your support! 😀