Hey everybody.

So i was away on vacation and because i didnt need the server there and i was away for a bit longer, i decided to shut it down for the 3 weeks i will be away. I just came back and started it again and at first it didnt do anything, didnt boot, no access to the webgui, nothing. i wanted to check the USB drive, well wasnt recognized by windows. 

So i thought ok, lets put on a backup i had and everything should be fine. I had to find out the the last backup i had is about 5 months old.... welp not good but it'll do for now. So i put that on the USB drive, plug it in, hangs while booting up..... I got another backup on my PC, 1 year old (yeah i know, its bad) welp, that did work atleast. What i forgot, in that time between that backup and now. one of the drives died. so of course it misses a drive. 

I updated unraid to the newest version, because that 1 year old backup was on i believe 6.11.5 or something, i gave unraid the new drive that was already used on that 5 month old backup, now it shows as: Unmountable: Unsupported or no File System.

I did do the rebuild of the array because i though that would fix it, but no it didnt and now i dont know what to do.

I also have 2 other drives that used to belong to that array, unraid want to format them now, which would be troublesome....

i did run diagnose, its attached. Hope someone can help, i am not a noob when it comes to PC tech, but i have come to the point where i dont know anymore and before i break something, or lose data, i'll ask.

Yours AveXx

nas-avexx-diagnostics-20240707-1954.zip

14 hours ago, AveXx said:

i gave unraid the new drive that was already used on that 5 month old backup

Can you expand on what you mean by this.

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Can you expand on what you mean by this.

Well start of the year one of my drives died. I used a spare I had. So pulled the dead drive, installed the new one, rebuild the array and did a backup of the USB drive afterwards (as I also did update plug-ins and changed some other stuff, that was not drive related). That backup gave me a bunch of errors when I tried to use it, now that I needed it.

 

But after I changed drives, everything worked great. 

I meant how did you make Unraid accept the new drive after restoring the backup

Oh. Well tbh I am not 100% sure why it "accepted" it, I am not even sure if I should call it's status "accepted" rn. But here is what I did after using the one year old backup:

 

Unraid showed me the old drive (the dead one) as missing drive. 

 

I then put the drive that I replaced the dead one with in that same slot. 

 

Unraid told me that if I start the array, it would have to rebuild it, which I thought would, after it's finished, then make the drive available again. 

 

So I let it rebuild the array (took like 5 or 6 hours) and then I had a look at the array and it is saying: "Unmountable: Unsupported or no File System" where it would show the capacity of that drive. 

 

That is what I did so far, if you mean that. 

 

20 minutes ago, AveXx said:

Unraid told me that if I start the array, it would have to rebuild it, which I thought would, after it's finished, then make the drive available again.

That's wasn't the best option, a new config would have been better, and btrfs is not very tolerant of this type of error, see here if any of the recovery options work, but possibly the data in that disk is lost, maybe with UFS Explorer or similar.

28 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

That's wasn't the best option, a new config would have been better, and btrfs is not very tolerant of this type of error, see here if any of the recovery options work, but possibly the data in that disk is lost, maybe with UFS Explorer or similar.

well, i still have access to the virtuell mounted array (or whatever its called again, Parity + 1 drive). And i am in the Progress of getting parts and drives to have a new NAS in my 19" enclosure that i got used from work... when that is done i wanted to do a clean config anyways. This server i first "put into service" in 2015. only extending it in capacity over the time.

Anyway, I'll try the recovery stuff. Correct me if i am wrong, as i have the Parity + 1 Drive, i should be fine to format the drive that gives me the unmountable error, prepair it again and rebuild the array and potentially have all Data right?

Also what about the other 2 drives, unraid wants to format when i try to mount them? they where part of the system before, just not with the old backup?

1 minute ago, AveXx said:

i should be fine to format the drive that gives me the unmountable error, prepair it again and rebuild the array and potentially have all Data right?

Nope, formatting will never recover any data.

15 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Nope, formatting will never recover any data.

I mean yeah, thats not what i wanted to say...

But wait did i misunderstood that for years? I thought that if i have 3 Drives (1x Parity + 2x "Data") and one of the Data drives fails e.g., that i can drop in a new drive, rebuild the array and if everything is OK, i should still have all Data (so to speak)?  

32 minutes ago, AveXx said:

But wait did i misunderstood that for years? I thought that if i have 3 Drives (1x Parity + 2x "Data") and one of the Data drives fails e.g., that i can drop in a new drive, rebuild the array and if everything is OK, i should still have all Data (so to speak)?  

A rebuild will make the physical drive match the ‘emulated’ one.   As long as the emulated drive is mounting fine then the rebuilt one should as well.   If the ‘emulated’ drive is not mounting then you want to look into trying to fix that before doing a rebuild.   The rebuild process runs at the physical sector level and just copies sectors from the emulated drive onto the physical one and has no understanding of the meaning of the content of those sectors.

 

You may find that a file recovery program like UFS Explorer on Windows can get most/all of the data.    That software is not free to run in recovery mode, but you can use the free version to see what would be recoverable.

57 minutes ago, itimpi said:

A rebuild will make the physical drive match the ‘emulated’ one.   As long as the emulated drive is mounting fine then the rebuilt one should as well.   If the ‘emulated’ drive is not mounting then you want to look into trying to fix that before doing a rebuild.   The rebuild process runs at the physical sector level and just copies sectors from the emulated drive onto the physical one and has no understanding of the meaning of the content of those sectors.

 

You may find that a file recovery program like UFS Explorer on Windows can get most/all of the data.    That software is not free to run in recovery mode, but you can use the free version to see what would be recoverable.

Ohh OK, i understand.

Short update:

I seem to have problems with my USB Drive (maybe what started this whole thing......), I started the server to try the recovery steps (i shut it down yesterday), and i got boot errors and Checksum errors when booting. I tried a different USB drive i have laying around, just for testing, that works fine (of course showing me that its not registered to my license, but it still boots after multiple reboots).

Are there perhaps any known issues with Intenso Micro Line Drives ? The first drive i used for my first unraid install was one and it worked for years (2015-2023 when the OG one died), so i got another one. Guess they are not as great (if they every where great, maybe i was just lucky) as they where in 2015... 

Edited July 8, 20241 yr by AveXx
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