Below is my current Unraid setup.

 

As you can see, my Disk 7 is dead. That happened a few days ago. While researching which drive to buy and replace it with, I go to restart my server and my array is stuck on "Mounting disks...".

 

Looking at the logs I can see the parity drive (sdd) is failing. As far as I know, the parity drive within Unraid does not have a file system, so I cannot attempt software repairs on it (fsck, xfs_repair, etc). I double-checked the cabling and plugged into a different slot, but still no beans. What options do I have besides restoring what I can from backup and accepting some data loss from the ~4TB I had on Disk7?

 

Also, why does my main page say Disk1 is Mounting, but the logs show that the Parity drive is the one stuck. bug?

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

europe-syslog-20240417-2312.zip europe-diagnostics-20240417-1811.zip

It does look like parity is failing, you can try cloning it with ddrescue, most cases it can recover 99.99% of the data, then use the clone to rebuild the disabled disk, of course there may be some corruption, but with some luck and if most of parity is recovered, it should be be very little to none.

It is always possible that disk7 is not really dead as the fact it is disabled simply means a write to it failed.   This can be caused by external factors such as cabling or power.  It is not showing up in the SMART information in the diagnostics so at the very least it is currently offline.   Have you taken any action to confirm it is dead?

 

@JorgeB mentioned using ddrescue with the parity drive.    It might also be possible to do it with the disabled drive as an alternative way of recovering its data.   I have succeeded in the past with ddrescue on drives that would fail their smart TESTS.   Regardless I would keep both of those drives intact until one of the approaches has worked to maximise recovery chances.

21 hours ago, JorgeB said:

It does look like parity is failing, you can try cloning it with ddrescue, most cases it can recover 99.99% of the data, then use the clone to rebuild the disabled disk, of course there may be some corruption, but with some luck and if most of parity is recovered, it should be be very little to none.

 

20 hours ago, itimpi said:

It is always possible that disk7 is not really dead as the fact it is disabled simply means a write to it failed.   This can be caused by external factors such as cabling or power.  It is not showing up in the SMART information in the diagnostics so at the very least it is currently offline.   Have you taken any action to confirm it is dead?

 

@JorgeB mentioned using ddrescue with the parity drive.    It might also be possible to do it with the disabled drive as an alternative way of recovering its data.   I have succeeded in the past with ddrescue on drives that would fail their smart TESTS.   Regardless I would keep both of those drives intact until one of the approaches has worked to maximise recovery chances.

I took your advice and am running ddrescue on disk7 via an Ubuntu live disk. The rescue is moving at full speed and no errors yet. Everything's going smoothly so far, fingers crossed 🙏