with Joe and a couple other guys help i made it through getting my array back up (still on v5b7), but one of my pretty new (one week old) 2TB drives all of a sudden showed a red dot next to it...it happens quite frequently that one of the other disk will briefly disconnect (because of a wobbly drive-tray, or some other reasons)...the guys suggested i stop the array, dis-associate that disk, start the array again (so the disk goes into simulated mode), then stop the array again, re-associate the old disk (it's so new that i strongly doubt it is faulty), and let the array rebuild it...done it many times before, never a problem like the one i'm having now:

 

the array started to rebuild a couple of times, but then stopped rebuilding, giving me a warning that the replacement disk is too small...how could that be? i have never used a disk smaller than 1TB in this array, and have been systematically replacing 1TB with a 2TB when i would hit 95+%...but even though this is a scenario where one 2TB disk replaces "another" 2TB disk (i use only WD Green Drives in this array), it somehow believes that the same disk is smaller all of a sudden? how can that be? while it was rebuilding the first time, i had to leave to Munich for a day, and while i was gone, one of my scripted programs wrote a few gigs to the array that was rebuilding at the time...but could that cause problems? i mean, i know it wasn't fault tolerant at the time, but when the disk is being simulated to keep the array up and running, it does have the same empty space as if the disk was there, no?

 

i attached a pic in which you can see that it lists the disk to be replaced as "1TB", and the disk i selected being obviously a 2TB (WD_20EARS), yet the array says below that the replacement disk is too small...i wanted to also attach the syslog, but noticed that it ballooned to nearly 1MB...but looking at it now it appears that something is definitely wrong...because of its size i had to compress it and put it on one of my servers for download: www.avpmatrix.com/_share/syslog.zip

 

hope i didn't lose data! i can get in a replacement drive by saturday, if need be...

 

What MB are you using?

i went through a rebuild about a year ago and now i'm not sure...any way to find out, other than opening the machine? or getting into the BIOS?

Sounds like I'm spamming (sorry...), but try my SimpleFeatures plugin. It has dmidecode built in, with a system profiler. Should give you your motherboard and BIOS version.

no worries, i love SimpleFeatures!...very clean UI design...i had it running and disabled it while i was troubleshooting my previous problem, but just re-enabled and started it again...what do i have to do to get the mb info?

dgaschk, is there a reason you suspect the motherboard, or why did you ask?

 

speeding_ant, how do i retrieve the mb info through your interface?

 

just to be sure, i ordered a replacement 2TB drive to arrive tomorrow...i hope it will be accepted as a replacement by unRAID...the current disk is still under warranty, and i can get it exchanged by WD, and use it to update one of the remaining 1TB drives in the array...still, if someone could read the syslog and let me know what it all means (how likely it is that i lost data), that would be much appreciated.

in the meantime i got the replacement drive, and used it to hopefully recover from the other drive failure (or at least what i assumed after it failed the rebuild multiple times)...however, even the new 2TB drive only made it about 35% through the rebuild, then also stopped rebuilding and went back to the red state...what could possibly cause this with two drives?

 

since the syslog is too big to attach here (1MB zipped!), here's the link:

http://www.avpmatrix.com/_share/syslog-110709.zip

my bad! i was looking at a cached page from before i exchanged the drives...in another browser the UI shows that it's 45% through the rebuild...phew! sorry for the unnecessary attention-grabbing!

the rebuild went through on the last try...so it must have been the disk, afterall...got another warranty replacement drive on the way....guess i got another TB out of the "breakdown", if nothing else.