Replacing drives

[SevenEleven]

Hello,

 

I have made a mistake I think, hopefully not a terrible one.

 

I wanted to upgrade a couple drives, shutdown the array, un-assigned the drive I wanted to replace. Powered down, and added the new drive.

 

The old drives were reiserfs I wanted to change the new drives to xfs. This required a format. I think I misunderstood the warning pop-up. And now have lost the files that were on those two drives. *Edit for clarity. It was the new drives that I formatted, the old ones had been removed.

 

They are intact. I still have them. And I can read them with the 'un-assigned devices' plugin.

 

What can I do to reverse what I have done. Or am I out of luck?

 

Thank you.

Edited January 23, 2023 by SevenEleven

[trurl]

Since you have already formatted the new disks as XFS, just copy from the Unassigned Device originals to the new disks. Changing filesystems is going to require copying data so you can reformat anyway.

 

Some additional details I hope will help you avoid future mistakes that might be more costly.

 

When rebuilding a disk to a new disk, the result will be the same filesystem as the original. Rebuild is just a bunch of bits, parity knows nothing at all about files and filesystems. Those bits represent the files and filesystems, so the original filesystem is what will result.

 

Format is NEVER part of rebuild. Format is a write operation.

 

Format means "write an empty filesystem (of some specific type such as XFS) to this disk". That is what format has always meant in every OS you have ever used.

 

Unraid treats that write operation just as it does any other, by updating parity. So when you format a disk in the parity array, the only thing that can be rebuilt is an empty filesystem.

[SevenEleven]

Thank you, very much.

[SevenEleven]

A couple questions if you dont mind before I start copying.

 

1. I can literally just use MC to copy everything from the old drives onto the new drives?

2. Does it matter if the data goes from old drive 2 to new drive 2? or can old drive 2 go onto new drive 1?

 

The old drives are labelled from where they came from, I just wanted to be sure how sensitive it would be to that situation.

 

Thanks again

[trurl]

Your questions make me want to ask many questions of you.

 

Probably a good place to start for me to get answers is for you to...

 

Attach Diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread.

[SevenEleven]

Thank you. Diagnostic attached 

tower-diagnostics-20230124-2019.zip

[trurl]

User shares are simply the combined top level folders on array and cache. The folder name is the same as the user share name.

 

So, the top level folders on your unassigned disks were part of your user shares. You could just copy the contents of those top level folders to their corresponding user share and let Unraid sort out which disk to put them on.

 

Or you can copy from unassigned disk to array disk, doesn't matter which disk since the top level folders of whichever disk are part of the user share named for that top level folder.

 

If you understand all that and you know the path to the unassigned disks and the path to your user shares or array disks, you should be OK to copy with mc.

 

Just be sure you don't work with array disks and user shares at the same time.