For the past couple of weeks, our power has been going off for about one hour, both morning and evening.

 

Possibly as a result of this, my UPS battery has failed, as has one of my drives.  While I've been able to buy a new 2TB drive, I can't find anywhere that has the APC battery for sale.

 

My problem is not being able to prepare my new drive in order to replace the failed drive.  I have now started preclear six times.  The pre-read takes just over six hours, and I have seen that complete several times.  Zeroing the first 2048 blocks(?) is fairly quick, and this completes.  However, on no occasion has the process finished writing zeroes to the rest of the drive, because the power always cuts off.

 

Because the power has been cut off so many times, without a graceful shutdown (because of the UPS battery failure), it is highly likely that the parity drive now has some corruption, so I cannot be sure that I can completely recover the failed drive.  However, my biggest fear is that another drive will fail before I manage to replace the first failed drive.

 

Is there any way that I can get the pre-clear process to restart from the last completed phase, rather than restarting from the pre-read everytime?  This is the only way that I can see to complete the disk preparation ... other than running the generator 24/7 until the process completes.

the -n parameter if I remember correctly will skip the pre/post read parts....  as long as you know your drive does not have any read/write errors.....

 

Myk

 

Ack I would just wait for the power to get fixed?

 

Going on UPS 2 times a day is actually not good for the ups or the server if it is a forced shutdown.. I would just unplug it from the wall and wait or take it elsewhere.. this sort of thing will lead to disaster.

Ack I would just wait for the power to get fixed?

 

Haha - the power is not broken ... this is load shedding to reduce the load on the power stations.  The whole city has a cycle of cuts ... you can tell by the operation of street lighting at night.

 

Going on UPS 2 times a day is actually not good for the ups or the server if it is a forced shutdown.. I would just unplug it from the wall and wait or take it elsewhere.. this sort of thing will lead to disaster.

 

Indeed - I'm aware of the dangers ... but this is Philippines, and my home now.

 

I desperately need to find a replacement UPS battery to reduce the danger for the server.

I believe that battery is a normal 12V sealed lead acid type, if so, my advice would be to get some heavy gauge wire and hook up a deep cycle automotive or boat battery. Just make sure it's fully charged before powering up with it, as the battery backup doesn't have a very fast charger circuit. You could basically have unlimited runtime if you hook your car up to the deep cycle battery with jumper cables. With regular power cuts in the foreseeable future, I'd consider maybe hooking up a large inverter, a group 15 deep cycle battery and a solar charger to augment a mains charger. Unraid is not going to be very happy with unreliable power, and that little APC isn't designed to run every day like a well made inverter is.

I have my unRAID server configured to shutdown after five minutes on battery power - this gives me enough time to start the generator up, if I'm home.  If I'm not, then the server will close down gracefully, before the UPS shuts down.

 

Anyway, I found the -W switch (that drive's had enough pre-reads) and it's now into the post-read, which means it's fully prepared to be added to the array, even if the post-read doesn't complete.

Easiest thing to do is forget about the preclear and just add the drive to the array.. unraid clears the disk itself to, it is true that you get a better test with full preclear but in your case I think getting back up with a complete set of drives is preferred..