January 30, 201214 yr Author It's a bad disk. Look at the current pending sectors. Those are sectors on the disk that cant' be read. Peter So trash the disk? I thought maybe I screwed up the disk by the way I stopped it in the middle of pending writes. But of course after a format and clear, it shouldn't still have a problem unless the disk is really bad. Bummer. At least I learned a little more abut unRAID, linux, and now have unMENU and PuTTY setup and I know about preclear, monthly parity checks, smartclr, etc. $130 lesson and lots of excellent free advice and help. Worth the hassle. Thanks guys!
January 30, 201214 yr It's a bad disk. Look at the current pending sectors. Those are sectors on the disk that cant' be read. Peter So trash the disk? I thought maybe I screwed up the disk by the way I stopped it in the middle of pending writes. But of course after a format and clear, it shouldn't still have a problem unless the disk is really bad. Bummer. At least I learned a little more abut unRAID, linux, and now have unMENU and PuTTY setup and I know about preclear, monthly parity checks, smartclr, etc. $130 lesson and lots of excellent free advice and help. Worth the hassle. Thanks guys! A "format" only writes a few sectors. A "preclear" writes to all the sectors. If the sectors marked as un-readable are not re-allocated, then the disk might be trashed. IT is worth trying that before returning the disk on an RMA. Joe L.
January 30, 201214 yr Author Man, I am a pest! I am trying to figure this out - the preclear of the WD EARS 2TB disk stopped at 50%. It was humming along at ~90 MBS when after 3:46:29 it reported "Killed" That's all, "Killed" Then when I tried to get a syslog, it also gave me "Killed". I couldn't find the flash drive on explorer to check for syslog and I couldn't start unMENU. I WAS able to Ctl-Alt-Del power down from unRAID, then restart and get syslog. It is attached. I did initconfig and doing parity sync with the 7 drives that are good. I added but did not assign the new Seagate 2YB disk. I started preclear script from the linux unRAID console, but got a funny notice about SMART. It exited the initial SMART report and said to add a -T argument. I haven't seen any example of the preclear script with SMART arguments, so I just ignored it. I did see where if you where running an older unRAID (4.4) the SMART reports wouldn't work without the installation of the smartmonitor tool, but I have 4.7 and I have been using smartctl already. Is this a problem? I was blissfully running 6 disks and using XBMC flawlessly before adding 2 disk, and now I know a little more and have much less confidence that anything will ever work flawlessly again! Sometimes ignorance is bliss I guess. Anyway, preclear and parity-sync are going on now (the Seagate is clearing much faster, pre-reading phase at ~125+ MB/s), so I will sign off and let it work! syslog01292012PM.txt
January 30, 201214 yr Author It's a bad disk. Look at the current pending sectors. Those are sectors on the disk that cant' be read. Peter So trash the disk? I thought maybe I screwed up the disk by the way I stopped it in the middle of pending writes. But of course after a format and clear, it shouldn't still have a problem unless the disk is really bad. Bummer. At least I learned a little more abut unRAID, linux, and now have unMENU and PuTTY setup and I know about preclear, monthly parity checks, smartclr, etc. $130 lesson and lots of excellent free advice and help. Worth the hassle. Thanks guys! A "format" only writes a few sectors. A "preclear" writes to all the sectors. If the sectors marked as un-readable are not re-allocated, then the disk might be trashed. IT is worth trying that before returning the disk on an RMA. Joe L. So I got ahead of myself. The preclear was Killed 2x. Are you saying that since I tried preclear and it failed the disk is trashed, or that I should try formatting? Now I am really confused. I can't get preclear to work, and I am checking when I bought these from Newegg. I think it is a 2 year warranty...
February 3, 201214 yr Author All 8 data disks up and doing great. All files recovered, and parity set for monthly check. No disk over 95% filled, and user shares set perfectly now for me. Runs great, looks great, ready to put in safe spot and finally use the dang thing! Never had to RMA a disk before. I guess I was lucky. Thanks everyone!
February 3, 201214 yr It's a bad disk. Look at the current pending sectors. Those are sectors on the disk that cant' be read. Peter So trash the disk? I thought maybe I screwed up the disk by the way I stopped it in the middle of pending writes. But of course after a format and clear, it shouldn't still have a problem unless the disk is really bad. Bummer. At least I learned a little more abut unRAID, linux, and now have unMENU and PuTTY setup and I know about preclear, monthly parity checks, smartclr, etc. $130 lesson and lots of excellent free advice and help. Worth the hassle. Thanks guys! A "format" only writes a few sectors. A "preclear" writes to all the sectors. If the sectors marked as un-readable are not re-allocated, then the disk might be trashed. IT is worth trying that before returning the disk on an RMA. Joe L. So I got ahead of myself. The preclear was Killed 2x. Are you saying that since I tried preclear and it failed the disk is trashed, or that I should try formatting? Now I am really confused. I can't get preclear to work, and I am checking when I bought these from Newegg. I think it is a 2 year warranty... If processes are being "killed" then you probably are running out of free memory and the kernel out-of-memory process is terminating what it thinks has been idle the longest in an attempt to free memory. About all you can do in this situation is reboot. no normal analysis of what is running, or not is helpful. There is probably nothing wrong with the disks themselves, just you've run out of memory. You'll see all kinds of errors in the syslog. Look there first. Joe L.
February 3, 201214 yr Author It's a bad disk. Look at the current pending sectors. Those are sectors on the disk that cant' be read. Peter So trash the disk? I thought maybe I screwed up the disk by the way I stopped it in the middle of pending writes. But of course after a format and clear, it shouldn't still have a problem unless the disk is really bad. Bummer. At least I learned a little more abut unRAID, linux, and now have unMENU and PuTTY setup and I know about preclear, monthly parity checks, smartclr, etc. $130 lesson and lots of excellent free advice and help. Worth the hassle. Thanks guys! A "format" only writes a few sectors. A "preclear" writes to all the sectors. If the sectors marked as un-readable are not re-allocated, then the disk might be trashed. IT is worth trying that before returning the disk on an RMA. Joe L. So I got ahead of myself. The preclear was Killed 2x. Are you saying that since I tried preclear and it failed the disk is trashed, or that I should try formatting? Now I am really confused. I can't get preclear to work, and I am checking when I bought these from Newegg. I think it is a 2 year warranty... If processes are being "killed" then you probably are running out of free memory and the kernel out-of-memory process is terminating what it thinks has been idle the longest in an attempt to free memory. About all you can do in this situation is reboot. no normal analysis of what is running, or not is helpful. There is probably nothing wrong with the disks themselves, just you've run out of memory. You'll see all kinds of errors in the syslog. Look there first. Joe L. I did a reboot. I went ahead and put a new non-EARS disk in and it did a good preclear and I have it up in the array now. Not an EARS problem necessarily, and I haven't tried it after reboot. I think I will try preclear again on it probably without adding it to the array. I am about 70% full for 16TB and I really don't have much left to add, but it would be nice not to deal with sending it back. Right now I am happy that I now have unMENU working, and I know how to preclear and do a parity check. Without this snafu I wouldn't have ever learned a linux command or had a clue about maintenance on my unRAID box. If you can't learn from your mistakes, well you are up a crick without a paddle. Thanks Joe! I am officially a uGG now.
February 3, 201214 yr hey bonami, I am in the process of setting up my first unraid box as well, and boy did I have my share of troubles. Motherboard incompatible with the ram, overvolting it out of the box to the degree that it would hang before the boot screen (no bios entry made it impossible to change voltage and timings) or usb external hard drives with SMART data not being read, or HPA on hard drives, etc. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that the configuration tutorial linked below is a great resource. I followed it to a "t" and had no problems with the config. For instance preclearing with screen is a must for large drives (I put in 4 2TB, 1 1TB and 1 500GB hardrives, all external originally in there and have been preclearing for weeks lol) Pre-clearing a 2TB usb 2.0 drive takes about 3 days. But I did have my unraid box up and running with access to media the whole time thanks to screen. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuration_Tutorial
February 4, 201214 yr Author hey bonami, I am in the process of setting up my first unraid box as well, and boy did I have my share of troubles. Motherboard incompatible with the ram, overvolting it out of the box to the degree that it would hang before the boot screen (no bios entry made it impossible to change voltage and timings) or usb external hard drives with SMART data not being read, or HPA on hard drives, etc. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that the configuration tutorial linked below is a great resource. I followed it to a "t" and had no problems with the config. For instance preclearing with screen is a must for large drives (I put in 4 2TB, 1 1TB and 1 500GB hardrives, all external originally in there and have been preclearing for weeks lol) Pre-clearing a 2TB usb 2.0 drive takes about 3 days. But I did have my unraid box up and running with access to media the whole time thanks to screen. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuration_Tutorial Thanks. I am learning about screen. Now that I am operating my unRAID box headless, I really have to use screen so I don't have the telnet problems I had - very painful to be halfway through and have the computer reboot closing the session.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.