February 12, 20251 yr Foreward: I recently submitted this report as an issue, from within the Unraid Web-UI itself - however I am also posting it here in the forums for additional visibility, and in order to pick the community's collective brainpower. As the content below describes, I had a catastrophic failure of my array, which was UNPROTECTED without an active parity disk cataloging the contents of the multiple failed disks. I am hoping that there is some way to recover from this, and wondering what the necessary steps are which would be required of me. Description: I'm having an issue with my Unraid build not recognizing or connecting to SEVERAL of my 10 connected HDDs. The parity drive which had been previously configured is displaying a status as missing, and several of the other slots are unassigned or empty with no device connected (despite having existing hardware plugged into them). I was in the process of transferring and copying data off of my 20TB drive, so that I could use it as a second parity disk - and the system became unstable during the transfer, so I had to reboot. After stopping the copy transfer of files, I implemented a server shut down and then restarted - when I noticed the following configuration in my Web-UI dashboard: ___________________________________________________________ DEVICE IDENTIFICATION ❌ Parity: no device Missing: WDC_WD221KFGX-68B9KN0_2GHEEKED - 22.0 TB ■ Parity 2: unassigned 🟢 Disk 1: WDC_WD201KFGX-68BKJNO_8LGB6BWA - 20TB (sde) ❌ Disk 2: no device Missing: ST18000NE000-2YY101_ZR50968T - 18.0 TB 🟢 Disk 3: ST18000NE000-2YY101_ZR50BPSG - 18 TB (sdh) 🟢 Disk 4: WDC_WD181KFGX-68AFPN0_3WG5KU3L - 18 TB (sdf) ❌ Disk 2: unassigned ❌ Disk 6: no device Missing: WDC_WD181KFGX-68AFPN0_3WG5KSLL - 18.0 TB 🟢 Disk 7: no device Missing: WDC_WD181KFGX-68AFPN0_3WG4SDEL - 18.0 TB 🟢 Disk 8: ST16000NM001G-2KK103_ZL24NS8H - 16 TB (sdc) 🟢 Disk 9: ST16000NM001G-2KK103_ZL209VPF - 16 TB (sdd) ■ Disk 10-13: unassigned ___________________________________________________________ How to reproduce: Attempt to create a second parity disk, by copying the content off of one of the larger drives in the array. Watch, as the system becomes unstable, and the VM's fail to boot or remain running consistently. Cancel the file transfer and copy task, and initiate a reboot - and then panic upon noticing that the array is completely borked and glitched out, with missing and unassigned disks which had previously existed in the array pool. Expected results: I was hoping that the files would have transferred successfully, so that the array could be rebuilt and reconfigured in order to have a second parity disk for additional protection. After rebooting, I expected all of the 10 disks to show up as they had previously been configured, in order to proceed as intended. Actual results: The array has failed catastrophically - with 4 of the 10 disks being "unassigned" or displaying as "no device" present in the array configuration panel. Other information: I have made no hardware modifications or alterations on the Unraid Server - and everything remains as it was previously configured, when things were working as intended. I completely understand the good-old adage that "RAID is not a backup", and I recognize that my poor practices are at fault here - for not having better data-management practices... although I DO find it ironic that I was in the process of hardening my system, and making things more resilient by creating additional redundancy - which was the precise moment when things failed! I am hoping that there is some way for me to retrieve and recover the data from the disks which appear to be missing from the dashboard. Thank you kindly for your attention to this matter, and I appreciate any and all help that can be sent my way in the form of advice, sympathy, and support!
February 12, 20251 yr Community Expert Check to see if the missing disks are detected in the board controller/BIOS, swap with different disks if necessary. Also, if you have the diagnostics before rebooting, or saving the last syslog to the flash drive is enabled, post them.
February 12, 20251 yr Community Expert 7 minutes ago, JorgeB said: if you have the diagnostics before rebooting Even if you don't Attach Diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread
February 12, 20251 yr Author Thank you both kindly for your responses to the inquiry that I've made here. I am hereby attaching a zip archive of my diagnostics that I ran on the system. I recognize that I SHOULD have included it earlier :-) - however, here it is... somewhat late to the party! Accessing the BIOS as a further diagnostics was an excellent suggestion JorgeB... and I feel kind of silly that I hadn't tried that yet. I was able to BRIEFLY get the missing disks to show up (for one single boot-sequence), by implementing the following procedures: I updated the BIOS firmware to the latest version, and also reseated the two PCI-e Raid Controller boards which the hard drives are plugged into via SATA cables. The disks then appeared as they had initially, HOWEVER I was unable to start my VM guest (which was configured with video-passthrough) because of the following error that crept up "host doesn't support VFIO PCI passthrough"... In order to address this, I ended up rebooting into BIOS again and enabling VTI-d - although I am unsure about how this got switched off during the whole trouble shooting procedure. After rebooting into the Unraid OS again, with the option enabled to passthrough the functionality of the video-card, I no longer could access the disks. Thinking that this setting might have been a possible cause of the issue, I toggled VTI-d off again, and performed a reboot once more - only to see that the disks were still missing and undetected. So the long and the short of it: I think that I might have a defective PCI-e RAID controller card plugged into my motherboard - which is causing the problem!? Either that or one of my PCI slots is not functioning properly... whatever the case is, I am going to get my hands on a spare card that matches the one I suspect may be faulty, and swap it out in the next day or two. I hope that this will fix the issue! Thanks again for your assistance, and I am hoping that I can solve this soon! tower-of-power-diagnostics-20250212-1253.zip
February 12, 20251 yr Community Expert Is the HBA this Marvell controller: 08:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9230 PCIe 2.0 x2 4-port SATA 6 Gb/s RAID Controller [1b4b:9230] (rev 11) Subsystem: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9230 PCIe 2.0 x2 4-port SATA 6 Gb/s RAID Controller [1b4b:9230] Kernel driver in use: ahci Kernel modules: ahci They can have issues with VT-d enabled (and other issues without it)
February 13, 20251 yr Author Quote Is the HBA this Marvell controller: Yeah, I have two of those pieces of hardware (each of which is equipped with four HDD's plugged into them) - that are probably the cause of the problem. The spare part that I WAS going to swap into place, in order to troubleshoot further is also a Marvell controller board... however, upon further consideration - I have ordered a LSI model 9300-8i (in IT mode) board which will hopefully serve as a reliable stand-in for both of these cards. I am very much hoping that I will simply be able to swap out the two offending Marvell controllers with this LSI board (which will be arriving in a few days from now), and re-connect my hard-drives to the new PCIe hardware in order to get everything up and running reliably again. I will update this thread as needed, and hopefully be able to mark the case as solved after I have done the swap-out!
February 13, 20251 yr Community Expert 1 hour ago, Info-Tech.guru said: I am very much hoping that I will simply be able to swap out the two offending Marvell controllers with this LSI board (which will be arriving in a few days from now), and re-connect my hard-drives to the new PCIe hardware in order to get everything up and running reliably again. You should, but any issues post new diags after array start.
February 18, 20251 yr Author Solution Hooray! After installing the following PCIe board into my tower: LSI 9300-8i 12Gbps SAS P16 (in IT mode) - I have succeeded in getting my Unraid server to function smoothly and flawlessly. It now recognizes all of the hard drives which had previously disconnected - and things are more stable in general, it seems. I guess that those Marvell controllers really DO present problems to this OS, and I am happy to have recovered from the issues which I had encountered. Thank you JorgeB, and trurl - I appreciate your attention to this matter! tower-of-power-diagnostics-20250217-2002.zip
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