Broken SATA Connector (I hate this)

[lurkio]

I was migrating towers and realized I broke the sata connector OFF my 8TB data drive. To complicate the situation these are shucked drives and dont power up with the newer power supply (known issue with shucked drives). I still have the parity drive, sound and healthy, but I'm in a pickle now. Because I have folks that use my VM's and dockers for services like Bitwarden (and as the data runs off the cache drive) I went ahead and ordered two new 8TB drives off amazon same day so I could get the rest of it back online. So, unraid is up, without my old data.

I "think" I can take the board off my parity drive, put it on the data drive (they are identical, from the same batch), then attach that drive to any linux system and copy the data to the new array as it's XFS. I think. I havent tried that yet because I dont want to make this worse. I've tried to glue the connector back on, because the pins appear to be fine, but it's just not working.

 

If I make another temporary unraid usb and use the working parity drive in the old tower as a new array would I still be able to copy the data off? Can you start the array without a data drive, I assume the answer is no? Help
 

[lurkio]

Ordered this, sounds like folks hot glue this baby on there and sometimes it's enough to work. It's worth $7 to try.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EK9B13W

[JonathanM]

39 minutes ago, lurkio said:

If I make another temporary unraid usb and use the working parity drive in the old tower as a new array would I still be able to copy the data off? Can you start the array without a data drive, I assume the answer is no?

IF you have ALL the drives EXACTLY as they were when one drive went missing, Unraid will emulate as many drives as there were parity drives assigned at that point. Sounds like you may have hosed yourself by actively using some of the drives. You CAN start the array with a missing drive, but all the rest have to be there.

 

Parity doesn't contain any data, just the answer to the equation formed by the rest of the data drives. When you know A+B+C+D=P, you can find the value of any single missing variable by using the rest. As soon as you remove 2 values, the answer isn't solvable for sure.

 

Hopefully your repair works out for you.

[lurkio]

This array consisted of only two drives, 1 parity 1 data. I still have both drives, but I've created a new array config with two new drives with that thumb drive.

The question becomes; if I use a fresh unraid usb stick and add "only" the parity drive can I start an array (zero data drives present). I think the answer is no. I have run fully on parity before, with the sole data drive dead (in a past array, not part of the failed one I am talking about here), unraid was able to emulate what the data should be from parity.

[lurkio]

I have the two shucked drives back in their enclosures and the broken sata connector appears to be working for the moment. However, when I attach them to unraid via usb neither of them appear to be the XFS formatted data drive. That seems strange, right? I have done nothing to these besides moved them. They were removed from a working installation, I saw the data drive had the broken connector and set them both aside, deciding instead to replace them and fix the array later if I could. 

[JonathanM]

Sometimes the USB enclosure alters the addressing, causing the partition not to start at the proper spot.

 

Any way you can hook them up direct to SATA?

 

Wouldn't hurt to collect diagnostics with them attached and attach the zip to your next post.

 

19 minutes ago, lurkio said:

This array consisted of only two drives, 1 parity 1 data. I still have both drives, but I've created a new array config with two new drives with that thumb drive.

The question becomes; if I use a fresh unraid usb stick and add "only" the parity drive can I start an array (zero data drives present). I think the answer is no.

In this case, either drive should be mountable, because as long as you used the parity1 slot, the two drives should essentially be a RAID1 mirror.

 

It's possible only one drive will SHOW as mountable, because the XFS signature would be identical keeping the second drive from mounting.

 

Since you only had 2 drives, you actually might be ok.

[lurkio]

I made a fresh unraid usb drive and booted that with only the old data drive, and it's working. I am transferring the data off and counting myself lucky, this time.