Hi Everyone,

 

I have a tower that used to contain 5 SATA drives. I wanted to add more drives into it but ran out of SATA connectors. I decided to add another Promise SATA300 TX4. My previous one in the machines worked great, so I decided to add an other one identical to the first one. So far so good. I added at the same time another 500 gig drive. Here is the funny thing that happened. When the system boots, I can see all my drives from the SATA controller view during the boot process and I can see the drives in Linux, but unRAID does not see them, worse than that, I have now less drives than I use to have... Previously I had 5 drives, now I added the controller and one drives and I have 4 total drives... Where have they gone?

 

Is there anyting special I should have done to unRAID for it to recognize my new controller?

 

I changed my parity drive before and I did not have any problems, but by adding this new controller and disk everything went "pouf".

 

Using unRAID 3.0.

 

Thanks for helping!

sdumas.

The Linux kernel has its own idea of what hardware to identify and assign device ID's to, and in what order.  So when you add drives, they may be assigned to slots previously assigned to something else.  Then when unRAID attempts to setup the array, it discovers that an existing drive is not assigned any more to that same device slot.  With the array stopped, go to the Devices page and click a drop-down box for one of the unassigned disks, and see if the drives are all listed there.  If so, re-assign them to their correct drives, serial number to disk number.

 

Hummm. Thanks for the info, I am getting further now.

 

I am still having an issue. It's giving me the message "Invalid Expansion". The two drives that were missing (one previously existing and the new one) have now a blue led next to them.

 

Should I "Restore" the array? If I do this, will it reformat my drives? I don't want my existing drives to be reformatted obviously, but the new one may need to be, right?

 

Anything else I can do?

 

Thanks!

sdumas

One more question while I am at it.

When I changed my parity drive, I did not replace the older samller drive into the array.

If I re-install the drive into the array, will it be confused into thinking it's another parity drive?

Will the system reformat the drive automatically or do I have to do something to reformat it manually?

 

Thanks again!

I didn't notice before that you were using unRAID 3.0, something I have never seen.  I personally would recommend installing 4.2.4 at this time, but that's your choice of course.

 

The only drive that is considered a parity drive is the one that is assigned to the Parity drive.  Any drive that previously contained parity info will appear as an unformatted drive (except in one special case which does not apply here).  The only drives that will be cleared and formatted will be those that are not currently formatted.  Your existing data drives should be safe, and you should be able to confirm that before clicking the 'Are you sure' check box and clicking the Restore button (the one associated with treating all drives as New, for a new array).  The unformatted drives should be labeled as 'Unformatted'.  Of course, I'm speaking from my experience with versions of 4.0 and higher, your screens and buttons and prompts and labels may look different.

 

If you get to a point where you see a confusing screen, screen capture it and attach it, and some with more experience with 3.0 should be better able to help.

 

I was thinking about upgrading to 4.x but I read some horror stories with people losing data... I don't want this to happen to me. In my case "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". 3.0 has been working very good for me. I will look into it when my array has been upgraded with the new hardware and stabilized

Thanks!

By performing a restore - it seemed to have brought back the array into a workable state.

 

I will be waiting for the parity drive to finish and then I will format the new drive.

 

Thanks again!

I was thinking about upgrading to 4.x but I read some horror stories with people losing data... I don't want this to happen to me. In my case "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". 3.0 has been working very good for me. I will look into it when my array has been upgraded with the new hardware and stabilized

Thanks!

 

What horror stories?