Replaced Parity Drive - trying to use old parity drive as data disk - what am I doing wrong!?

[lxr200]

Hey all! so quick explanation - have a 12bay rack mount case with (1) 8TB parity and (4) 8TB data drives (all WD Red Plus) recently just got (2) 10TB WD Red Plus drives. My goal is to replace the 8TB Parity with one of the new 10TB drives, then use the old 8TB parity as a new data drive. I followed this route below:

 

- Precleared new drives and formatted

- Stopped array, unassigned old pairty

- Started Array

- Stopped array

- Put new 10TB drive as parity and let it rebuild parity

- Assigned old 8tb parity drive in data and let it do a disk clear

- Formated old parity to XFS

 

Now whenever I try to assign it to a data drive it always tries to "rebuild parity" and now when I unassign it and start array it shows Disk missing contents emulated. or Disk dsbl in error state. For the life of me I can't figure out how to just get it to be a data disk. Maybe I missed a step or I'm just being stupid.

 

EDIT - Unraid version is currently 6.12.8

EDIT 2 - a few pics of what I'm seeing.

Attached is my Diagnostics.

mediaserver-diagnostics-20240403-2054.zip

Edited April 4 by lxr200

[itimpi]

I am confused.     In you list of steps it was assigned in the second last step and then formatted in the last one.   Why are you trying to do anything after that?

[lxr200]

18 hours ago, itimpi said:

I am confused.     In you list of steps it was assigned in the second last step and then formatted in the last one.   Why are you trying to do anything after that?

 

So after It did the disk clear, it was saying unable to mount / unsupported file system, so I tried formatting it assuming that it needed to be formatted but then kept having issues.

 

I will say, I went ahead and just did the "data rebuild" and it rebuilt the empty drive lol, so it seems to be working now, even if it did do it in a weird and I'm assuming an unnecessarily complicated way. I'm not sure if I messed a step up, or what.

 

EDIT - for clarification, in the steps that I saw, after the new parity has been built on the new parity drive, it said to just pop the old parity disk in an assigned data drive spot and unraid wil clear it and do everything that needs to be done (maybe i misread something). going forward I assume after the new parity is built, I just just keep the old parity drive unassigned and do a pre-clear before trying to add it to the array?

 

EDIT 2 - this is the post I followed..

maybe its supposed to be common knowledge to pre-clear the drive first which I didn't do. but I just did it in that exact order and something got goofed up

Edited April 5 by lxr200

[itimpi]

The correct process for adding new disks is documented here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page.    As you will see the last step was to format the drive which you said you did.   The fact that the subsequent rebuild resulted in an empty file system suggests that the format succeeded so at that point you should have been good to go without the rebuild.

 

2 hours ago, lxr200 said:

maybe its supposed to be common knowledge to pre-clear the drive first which I didn't do. but I just did it in that exact order and something got goofed up

there was definitely no need to Preclear the drive which is why it is not built into the core Unraid system.    The link above discusses Clear v PreClear.   In this case of an old parity drive being reused as a new data drive a preclear just wastes time.