Device is Missing (Disabled), Contents Emulated - But No Data

[Dennip]

So i think i've fucked up.

Basically one of my 1TB drives failed and became emulated with the above message. I had a spare 1TB plugged in ready to go.

After a SMART check on this failed drive I decided to give it another crack, and wanted to rebuild onto it again as it seemed ok.

I removed the assignment for the failed drive, (Disk 2).

Then, somehow i ended up adding the failed drive back in a new slot (Disk 6), whilst also adding my spare 1TB back, as Drive 7. I think during this process the disks (now 6 & 7) were formatted. So the failed disk has been formatted. But the parity should still be good right?

So now i have two new drives, 6 & 7, with 2 showing as 'missing contents emulated'

However - there doesn't appear to actually be any contents that is emulated. Its just empty, 0 directories. and various dockers are seeing these files as deleted. At this point i have no idea how to know what exactly was on that 1TB and could be lost.

Please advise!!

tower-diagnostics-20230921-2345.zip

[MrGrey]

You have a backup? (I hope)

 

MrGrey.

 

[dboonthego]

I'll admit I'm not the best at interpretation of the logs.  If you formatted (which it looks like you did) hopefully you have a backup.  I wouldn't do anything further without advice from someone more experienced.  This does not look good.

 

Sep 17 22:00:56 Tower emhttpd: shcmd (95378): /sbin/wipefs -a /dev/md2

[JorgeB]

Like mentioned the emulated disk2 was formatted, so any data there is gone, format is never part of a rebuild, there's a warning about that, do you still have the old disk intact?

[itimpi]

7 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

format is never part of a rebuild, there's a warning about that

In this case I suspect that when it came around to formatting the newly added drives it was not noticed that the emulated drive was also on the list of drives that would be formatted.   As you mention best chance of recovery at this point is from the original drive.

[dboonthego]

28 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

do you still have the old disk intact?

 

It looked like disk6 and disk7 were also formatted.

[itimpi]

3 minutes ago, dboonthego said:

 

It looked like disk6 and disk7 were also formatted.

 

That is not unreasonable as they were new drives.  What might have been overlooked at the time was if the emulated drive was also on the list of those to be formatted when the format option was allowed to proceed.

 

A nice GUI enhancement would be to have format button against the individual drives in the Main tab so it was clearer what was going to be formatted.   Not sure, though, how easy that would be to implement.

[dboonthego]

3 minutes ago, itimpi said:

they were new drives.

One of them was new.  The other was disk2.

[itimpi]

1 minute ago, dboonthego said:

The other was disk2.

This would have wiped the file system then.   

 

If you have not written new data to the drive it is possible disk recovery software something like UFS Explorer on Windows could recover data.  However they tend not to be free to use although you can normally run a free test to see what it might recover.

[Dennip]

I didn’t realise that the format was also going to format disk 2, specifically the emulated parity data of disk 2. I didn’t think format would apply to anything not a real disk?

My intention was to format the new drive (not emulated disk 2)
 

the actual disk has been formatted as it is now disk 6, but data hasn’t been written to it so I may be able to recover something.

Edited September 22, 2023 by Dennip

[Dennip]

I have backups for important stuff, docuements/pictures etc, the media i'm not too fussed about losing. My bigger issue is that i have no idea what has been deleted other than a few obvious things that a docker container picked up.

Will i have to download my backups and do a folder by folder comparison or is there some way to see what was wiped from the file system?

[JonathanM]

On 9/22/2023 at 4:08 AM, itimpi said:

A nice GUI enhancement would be to have format button against the individual drives in the Main tab so it was clearer what was going to be formatted.   Not sure, though, how easy that would be to implement.

I asked a long time ago to move the format option to the individual drive pages, possibly next to the selection of format type, or even better underneath the file system check area so you have to read through the file system check area before you even get to the format button. I don't believe it's a good idea to have a universal format option on the main page.

 

The pushback to my suggestion was that a new array would take forever to go through each drive one at a time to format. My counter was that totally new array drives are a very limited situation, and it's worth the extra time to show the new user where to maintain each disk, in the same area with smart information and file system checks.

 

I felt like I was talking to a wall, nothing was ever acknowledged.

[Dennip]

1 minute ago, JonathanM said:

I asked a long time ago to move the format option to the individual drive pages, possibly next to the selection of format type, or even better underneath the file system check area so you have to read through the file system check area before you even get to the format button. I don't believe it's a good idea to have a universal format option on the main page.

 

The pushback to my suggestion was that a new array would take forever to go through each drive one at a time to format. My counter was that totally new array drives are a very limited situation, and it's worth the extra time to show the new user where to maintain each disk, in the same area with smart information and file system checks.

 

I felt like I was talking to a wall, nothing was ever acknowledged.

 

Yep it was not super clear - and to be honest I had no idea that the emulated parity 'drive' could even be formatted.

[Mainfrezzer]

19 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

I asked a long time ago to move the format option to the individual drive pages, possibly next to the selection of format type, or even better underneath the file system check area so you have to read through the file system check area before you even get to the format button. I don't believe it's a good idea to have a universal format option on the main page.

 

The pushback to my suggestion was that a new array would take forever to go through each drive one at a time to format. My counter was that totally new array drives are a very limited situation, and it's worth the extra time to show the new user where to maintain each disk, in the same area with smart information and file system checks.

 

I felt like I was talking to a wall, nothing was ever acknowledged.

The popup thats there currently with required text entry of "i understand that formatting a harddrive is not part of recovery" would be a good compromise.

[JonathanM]

28 minutes ago, Dennip said:

I had no idea that the emulated parity 'drive' could even be formatted.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation where an emulated drive should ever be formatted. If it's unmountable it needs a file system check. Normally an emulated drive will be indistinguishable from the drive that has been dropped because of a write error, as long as parity was completely in sync when the drive was dropped. All the normal things you can do to a physical drive can be done to the emulated drive, such as reading the existing data, writing new data, formatting it, scanning for filesystem errors, etc.