Unmountable disks present (the two unmountable drives were my "old" parity drives)

[johmei]

Sometime last year or the year before I purchased 3 x 12 TB drives.  I made two my new parity drives, and added the third one as a data drive.  This year I discovered 18 TB drives were now the same cost as the 12 TB drives I purchased previously, and 12 TB drives were not that much cheaper, so I bought 2 x 18 TB to replace my 12 TB parity drives.  All went well with that, but when I tried to add my 12 TB drives to the array as data drives I was greeted with that wonderful error after it spent over 12 hours formatting them both. So....things that are different; All my drives were previously connected to an LSI SAS2008 controller.  It has a capacity of 8 SATA drives and since I just added 2 beyond that, my parity drives are now on the integrated controller, X370 Series Chipset SATA Controller.  Those seem to be working fine and without issue.  In fact, all the 12 TB drives aren't even on a different physical cable than they were previously...and I've heard that a bad cable can cause this issue.  I've attached the Diag here.  I could try again but I wanted to run it by some experts before I try again since I'm assuming if I try to add them again, it'll clear the drive again and will take another 12 plus hours to do so.

 

Thanks so much!

johnsnas-diagnostics-20230215-0922.zip

Edited February 15, 2023 by johmei

[trurl]

4 minutes ago, johmei said:

when I tried to add my 12 TB drives to the array as data drives I was greeted with that wonderful error after it spent over 12 hours formatting them both.

Probably you are mistaken that it spent 12 hours formatting the old parity drives. Format doesn't take much time at all.

 

When you ADD disk(s) to new slot(s) in the parity array with valid parity, the new disk(s) must be cleared so parity will remain valid. Clearing the disks is probably what took 12 hours.

 

If they have finished clearing you can format them now. It will take a few minutes at most.

[trurl]

syslog confirms

Feb 14 15:21:29 Johnsnas kernel: md: recovery thread: clear ...
...
Feb 15 07:50:37 Johnsnas kernel: md: recovery thread: exit status: 0

 

[johmei]

12 minutes ago, trurl said:

Probably you are mistaken that it spent 12 hours formatting the old parity drives. Format doesn't take much time at all.

 

When you ADD disk(s) to new slot(s) in the parity array with valid parity, the new disk(s) must be cleared so parity will remain valid. Clearing the disks is probably what took 12 hours.

 

If they have finished clearing you can format them now. It will take a few minutes at most.

 

My mistake; I used to do full formats that would take hours so that's where my mind was.

 

10 minutes ago, trurl said:

syslog confirms

Feb 14 15:21:29 Johnsnas kernel: md: recovery thread: clear ...
...
Feb 15 07:50:37 Johnsnas kernel: md: recovery thread: exit status: 0

 

Awesome, thanks!  Could you elaborate on what these log entries mean?  I'd like to understand them a bit better.

 

Thanks again!!

[johmei]

Also, I feel REALLY stupid.  The option to format them is RIGHT there in front of my face.  I jumped to making a post WAY too fast which I usually avoid doing but....ughhh...the information is on the web, readily available, and I didn't bother checking.  I am so sorry. 😕 

[trurl]

The first entry is just saying it has started a recovery thread to begin the clears, and the last entry says the thread has completed without errors. You can see the duration from the timestamps.

 

15 minutes ago, johmei said:

I used to do full formats that would take hours

I think Windows and other GUI OS is probably to blame for misunderstandings of format. They often bundle partitioning, formatting (which they call quick format), and some other thing they do (full format) which requires going over the entire disk.

 

12 minutes ago, johmei said:

Also, I feel REALLY stupid.  The option to format them is RIGHT there in front of my face.  I jumped to making a post WAY too fast which I usually avoid doing but....ughhh...the information is on the web, readily available, and I didn't bother checking.  I am so sorry. 😕 

I would much rather you ask, especially when Format is involved. Unraid will offer to format any unmountable disks, which is NOT what you want to do if the disk is supposed to have data on it.

 

People sometimes format a disk they are trying to rebuild, perhaps because they think you must always format a new disk (misunderstanding), or perhaps because the emulated disk is unmountable so Format is an option. After format in the array, the only thing it can rebuild is a formatted disk.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Unraid will offer to format any unmountable disks, which is NOT what you want to do if the disk is supposed to have data on it.

The correct way to deal with this is check filesystem. Please ask for help if you get an unmountable disk that should have files on it.

[johmei]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

I would much rather you ask, especially when Format is involved. Unraid will offer to format any unmountable disks, which is NOT what you want to do if the disk is supposed to have data on it.

 

People sometimes format a disk they are trying to rebuild, perhaps because they think you must always format a new disk (misunderstanding), or perhaps because the emulated disk is unmountable so Format is an option. After format in the array, the only thing it can rebuild is a formatted disk.

Thanks for the explanation there!

 

And that's a really good point.  While I was loosely throwing around the term formatting incorrectly, the one thing I do know is that formatting will always obliterate the data (or at least the index) and in this case, it doesn't matter (the clearing would have destroyed any data already).  But I can see where if I was replacing a drive, and it finished rebuilding and this popped up, I could have made a mistake.  So I feel better about it now!

 

Thanks again so much!

[johmei]

7 minutes ago, trurl said:

The correct way to deal with this is check filesystem. Please ask for help if you get an unmountable disk that should have files on it.

Thank you!!