Reinstalling after disconnecting everything

[BluJay]

Sorry - I am a newbie. I am slowly building and upgrading my system and in doing so I unplugged all the hard drives and put them back in - and probably not in the correct configuration (tight configuration in my case and was easier to unplug everything to move things around). If my research is correct the one drive that shows up under the Unassigned Devices section with the mount/unmount button grayed out means it was the original parity drive (https://forums.unraid.net/topic/36529-how-to-identify-parity-drive/)- so I assigned it as such. I installed the “Unassigned Devices” apps so I could see the contents of the other drives and then I assigned them to what I think could be the correct disk location numbers based on what I remember them to have on them, type, and size. Hopefully I got them in all the correct spot. 

 

My main question is how do I make sure the parity drive builds from the other drives so I am sure I do not lose any data on those drives?

 

Next to the Parity drive (and only this drive) it says “All existing data on this device will be OVERWRITTEN when array is Started.” Does this mean only this drive will lose info and the other drives will not lose info? So my data will remain intact?

 

I have it ready (I think) to do a parity check and it says the following near the “Start” button at the bottom:

“Start will record all disk information, bring the array on-line, and start Parity-Sync.

The array will be immediately available, but unprotected until Parity-Sync completes.”

 

There is a “Parity is already valid” check box available as well as a “Maintenance mode” check box. I don’t know If I should use any of these.

 

Some other background. For some an unknown reason I could not boot up from the thumb drive as I originally intended. Doing so from the back up did not work (it was 6 months old and I probably should have made a fresh one before doing all this 2 months ago). I could only do a fresh reinstall of the thumb drive using the Unraid USB Creator and this seemed to get things up to where I am at now. I read from the following 2 regarding the above and thus when I did reinstall to the thumb drive I tried copying the the “Config” folder to no avail. I ended up making a new thumb drive from an old creator (Unraid.USB.Creator.Win32-1.8.exe) thinking that might work and copying over the “Config” folder again to no avail. So instead I used a newer creator (Unraid.USB.Creator.Win32-2.1.exe) and instead of just copying the “Config” folder, I copied all the files and folders from my backup hoping to get something from the backup to work. My hopes remain dashed, but I was able to boot into Unraid from it now we are caught up to above.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/128730-unraid-611-will-not-boot/#comment-1172672

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/85423-solved-unraid-server-does-not-boot-anymore-need-help-to-learn-from-my-mistake/

 

Thanks,

 

J

jnas-diagnostics-20230101-1927.zip