Need help

[Mylo75]

Ok I think I have made an absolute balls up with my server.

 

I got new hardware and was messing about with dual booting windows and unraid. But when I went back and booted unraid my parity and 4 out of my 5 disks are now showing as unmountable saying 'unsupported partition layout'.

 

Am I totally screwed or can I recover my data. I tried running Check Filesystem Status using -v on 1 disk but didn't seem to do anything.

 

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

tower-diagnostics-20221219-1037.zip

[JorgeB]

Filesystem check won't help since the problem are the partitions, not the filesystem, if parity is still valid you might be able to rebuild the disks one at a time, you can test by unassigning one of the unmountable disks and starting the array, Unraid will recreate the partition then see if the emulated disk mounts.

[Mylo75]

When I remove 1 disk it says 

'Too many wrong and/or missing disks!'

[JorgeB]

That doesn't make sense, post a screenshot of main.

[Mylo75]

I got advise on another forum to do a new config. Did I just make things even worse! 

 

[JorgeB]

New config won't help with this, are all the disks in their original slots?

[JorgeB]

Post a screenshot showing the disks.

[Mylo75]

Yes I clicked the preserve all slots.

[JorgeB]

Did you start the array after the new config?

[Mylo75]

no

[JorgeB]

You must have or the array disks wound not be green, this might make recovery more difficult, but do another new config, keep all assignments, then check "parity is already valid" and "maintenance mode" then start the array, then stop array, unassign disk1 and start array, in normal mode now, then post new diags.

[Mylo75]

Ok done that. I stopped the array immediately after downloading diagnostics.

 

tower-diagnostics-20221219-1135.zip

[JorgeB]

Emulated Disk1 mounted, if contents look correct you can rebuild on top, after that's done repeat for the remaining unmountable disks, one at a time.

[Mylo75]

Idiots guide needed for me.

 

1. Start array with disk 1 unassigned

2

[Mylo75]

It shows disk 1 in Unassigned Devices with the format option.  Do I format and add it back to array and rebuid parity?

[Mylo75]

Ok think i got it, I can add disk 1 back to array and it shows as blue.

 

Do I now start Parity-Sync and/or Data-Rebuild.

 

Thanks for your help and patience.

[JorgeB]

25 minutes ago, Mylo75 said:

Ok think i got it, I can add disk 1 back to array and it shows as blue.

 

Do I now start Parity-Sync and/or Data-Rebuild.

Yes, that's it.

[Mylo75]

16 days to complete, is that normal.

[JorgeB]

Nope

[Mylo75]

Its went down to 9 hours. 5% done in 2 hours, this will be a long process.

[JorgeB]

That sounds more like it, and normal for the disk size.

[trurl]

3 hours ago, Mylo75 said:

messing about with dual booting windows and unraid

Just in case it isn't obvious, you must never let windows touch any unraid disk.

[Mylo75]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Just in case it isn't obvious, you must never let windows touch any unraid disk.

 

Yea I've learnt my lesson.

[trurl]

Dual boot is OK. Letting Windows do anything to an Unraid disk in Disk Manager or anything else is not OK.

 

And Windows cannot work natively with Unraid filesystems. If you have something installed in Windows that will let it read Unraid filesystems, it might be OK to let it read an Unraid disk depending on exactly what it does. It must mount the disk read-only or it will invalidate parity even if you don't actually write to the disk.

 

Why not run a Windows VM in Unraid instead of dual-booting?

 

Another possibility is to have an Unassigned Device formatted NTFS and only let Windows have access to that. Windows and Unraid could both work with that disk.

[Mylo75]

Yes my plan is to set up a windows VM and passthrough my GPU,  usb and 1 of my 1TB nvme drives.  It was just the new hardware that had got me fiddling and experimenting. When I get unraid up and running again there will be no more fiddling for me. 

 

Thanks for all the help and advice everyone. Probably going to need more getting this VM setup.