February 9, 200818 yr Installed 4.2 last week and 3 of my 5 drives are still formatting? Can anyone shed some light Thanks
February 9, 200818 yr Installed 4.2 last week and 3 of my 5 drives are still formatting? Can anyone shed some light Yeah, something is wrong. ;-) It shouldn't take that long. If you have no data on the system I would consider shutting it down and trying again, though you should wait a bit for some others to post their thoughts. Bill
February 9, 200818 yr Author Thanks for the quick reply Bill. Yeah, I'll wait as I want to see if anyone else has experienced this. G
February 9, 200818 yr You either have VERY big drives... or very SLOW drives or VERY BIG SLOW drives or something is VERY wrong. Overnight I can see, but a week... nope. Time to hit the refresh button on the web-interface and if still formatting, the reboot button (if available) or reset button if not. If using IDE drives and an old 40 wire cable, or a round cable that does not meet specs you could end up in PIO mode... that would drastically slow down everything. If using SATA drives with a bios mode emulating IDE drives you could also end up really slow. Joe L.
February 11, 200818 yr I just set up my new unRAID server. I was expecting formatting to take a very long time (I read it had to clear all sectors to binary 0) to not affect parity. But if you "Restore" the array before formatting, the format goes VERY quickly. unRAID realizes that it needs to recompute parity anyway, and skips the zeroing step. Even if your drives were very slow, it would be able to complete this quick format. You might want to see if that hangs. If it doesn't, you can run some speed tests. (Note that restoring the array means that your array is unprotected until parity is rebuilt). I believe that you can achieve the same result by removing the parity drive from the array temporarily.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.