Yesterday, I tried updating Unraid on my USB drive. After rebooting, I couldn't boot from the USB drive anymore. Windows and Fedora can't read any files on the drive. So I reinstalled Unraid on a different USB drive which works.

 

I read through the "Lost array configuration" documentation and I'm not sure what I should do.

 

Unfortunately, I do not have a recent backup of the USB drives contents with an up to date super.dat file. I only have a very old backup which I made just after installing Unraid for the first time. During backing up, my array was not fully set up yet (it was missing the main storage and parity drives).

 

What I do have though, is a more recent diagnostics report in a zip file. The file contains information in the smart directory which tells me which drives were set up as parity and which were set up as storage.

 

After booting the old Unraid backup, my previous main storage drive and parity drive are recognized as 'new devices'. The storage drive is also marked with 'device encrypted' (which it is).

 

My main questions are:

1.  Will I loose data when I start my broken array configuration with my old drives marked as 'new devices'? If yes, what should I do instead? Or is there maybe a way I can safely test running my array without risking any data loss?

2. Should I use a fresh Unraid installation to continue running my array or can I use my partially set up backup which has an outdated array configuration? (Can I delete the previous array configuration and continue using everything else, like the user account)

3. Can I somehow use the contents of the diagnostics zip file to help restore my array or any other settings?

 

I now know that I really should have had a backup of my USB drive contents. But I hope someone can help a beginner like me safely access my storage.

 

 

Edit:

I further read the documentation and thought a bit, is this the correct and safe way to do things?

1. Go to 'Tools -> New Config'. Create a new array config since the array config from the backup is outdated.

2. Set both HDDs and the SSD to Disk 1, 2 and 3.

3. Start the array (could I lose any data at step?)

4. The HDD that was used as parity before should show a mount error.

5. Stop the array and recreate config again? (Do I need to do that?)

6. Set the HDD with the mount error as parity and the SSD and HDD as Disk 1 and 2.

7. Start the array and my data and shares should appear.

 

The diagnostics files indicate the parity and data HDDs with IDs but I want to 100% make sure that I don't lose any data.

Edited November 9, 20241 yr by vincent7

SSDs in the parity array cannot be trimmed. The usual place for SSD would be in a pool such as cache. This might be a good opportunity to reconsider your assignments.

 

If you do want to consider that, you will have to New Config and rebuild parity anyway.

 

Those Diagnostics should tell us what the assignments were, and if you want to be sure you don't assign a data disk to parity, you can just leave the parity unassigned and then assign and build parity after you confirm your other disks have your data.

 

Post those diagnostics.