Long story short - had been getting an intermittent error with one of my discs and it would show up as disabled. Swapped out a cable and everything was fine for a couple of months, but then the issue became persistent. Today (after red dot) I swapped out the drive (9) with a new one and started the data rebuild, which was going swimmingly until it threw an error and paused the process. Now it looks as if drive 13 has failed completely - any magic tricks to try? If not, I'll just cry and move on  

I did try and check filesystem status on 13 - but no love as it just errored out

tower-syslog-20230110-1353.zip tower-diagnostics-20230110-0552.zip

Diags are after rebooting so we cannot see what happened, but disk13 is missing, if the disk is really dead not much you can do, check/replace cables to see if it comes back online.

Will do - thanks!

14 minutes ago, rockytt said:

swapped out the drive (9) with a new one

Do you still have the original disk9? Might be possible to get that one back into the array and see if it can help rebuild disk13 if disk13 is truly dead.

Wish I still had original disk9

 

I did pull disk13 and have it connected to a windows PC with an XFS file explorer. I don't want to jinx anything, but I've managed to grab over 100gb of files so far and the process is still running. I figure that if I can save the files from that disk at least, it will only be 50% as painful!

 

Begs the question - wonder if there is a way to:

Put a new disk13 into the array and copy the files to it (w/o affecting parity), then put in a new disk9 and rebuild that one (9) from parity?

(This is likely where knowledgeable people slap their palms on their foreheads and shake their heads sadly...)

16 minutes ago, rockytt said:

Put a new disk13 into the array and copy the files to it (w/o affecting parity), then put in a new disk9 and rebuild that one (9) from parity?

Yes, if the disk can be cloned with ddrescue for example, of course any read errors can result on corrupt data both on that disk and for the rebuilt one, but the disk might be OK, get a SMART report.

And make sure you are accessing the disk in Windows in read-only mode.

30 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

if the disk can be cloned

Note that this is very different than simply copying the files. The files you have copied will not be useful for this. 

Thank you both for you help - 

First order of business is saving as much data as possible (Windows), which will likely take me into tomorrow. Afterwards, I'll take a crack at cloning the (supposedly) bad drive13 - pretty sure XFS file system will create a few challenges - and will update here - thanks!

9 minutes ago, rockytt said:

cloning the (supposedly) bad drive13 - pretty sure XFS file system will create a few challenges

Filesystem is irrelevant to cloning. 

See here for a ddrescue guide.

Thank you both for your assistance - was able to successfully clone disk13 using ddrescue and then rebuild disk9 from parity - good stuff!