Help me figure out why I reformatted a hard drive

[Jeff in Indy]

I royally screwed up and reformatted one of my hard drives, but I didn't see any other option.  Let me walk through what happened and set me straight on where I went wrong (besides, obviously, reformatting).

 

I had a SATA card go belly up.  It resulted in one of my drives getting out of sync.  After I replaced the card (thanks for the day delay, Amazon), I did the whole stop/start/stop/start the array to get it to rebuild the drive.  The server faithfully rebuilt my drive, which took a day plus.

 

I came home tonight, and it was completed.  The drive had a green dot, the array said it was good.  But my drive did not have the Browse option, and on the right side, it said the drive was not formatted.  but otherwise, it all looked good.  It wasn't emulating the contents, etc.

 

Not seeing any other option, and the drive telling me it didn't have a format on it, I ignored the "Don't format a drive when rebuilding!" warning, and faithfully destroyed 12TB of my data.

 

So a few questions:

- Why did it spend 2 days rebuilding when it said there wasn't a proper format on the drive?

- What would the right option have been when it said that?

- Is there any tool to periodically get a list of the contents of each drive, so I would at least know what was missing?

- Can Unraid change the warning message to "Hey! Jeff!  Don't be an idiot!  I don't care WHAT the message is!  DON'T reformat the drive!"

 

Thanks all.

[JorgeB]

For unmountbale drives you usually need to check filesystem, if the emulated disk is unmountable the rebuilt disk will be the same, so usually you check filesystem before rebuilding to confirm it can be fixed.