So here's the situation:

 

Server:

AM2

M4A78L-M Motherboard

4 GB RAM

AOC-SASLP-MV8

10 HDDs (9+Parity)

Unraid 4.7

 

Issue:

My disk 3 (Seagate ST31500341AS_9VS0BN30) had previously (about a week or two ago) become "DSK_DSBL". I checked the forum and found that the fix was to:

 

1) stop the array

2) unassign disk 3

3) start the array

4) stop the array

5) reassign disk 3

6) start the array and rebuild disk 3

 

This worked fine and things returned to normal. Tonight I noticed something was up with my shares and upon checking the unraid web gui the same problem had occurred (disk 3 was "DSK_DSBL"). So I repreated the prior fix, although I was planning to do some more diagnostics once the array was protected again, perhaps even RMAing the drive.

 

What happened instead after completing step 6) was that most of my drives appeared as unformatted. I noticed this almost right away and I cancelled the rebuild and stopped the array. It says in the unmenu page that over 2,000,000 changes to parity were made (oh sh!t).

 

So what's the bad news... what have I lost and how do I go about salvaging things. I'm too afraid to start up the array again until I have a level headed expert tell me what stupid thing I did wrong and what the right move is next.

 

My syslog is massive, so I've linked it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28310285/syslog-2012-04-27.zip - I don't think it will be of much help though.

 

Let me know if there is anything else I can provide or explain.

 

Thanks in advance.

So I finally had some time to dig into this problem. I don't know what caused the initial problems, but here is what I've done:

 

1) Tried to read the file system of each disk with reiserfsck. Not all disks returned information, many were not found.

2) With disk3 removed from the array, I rebooted the system from the Unraid Main webgui.

3) Upon rebooting I checked every disk with reiserfsck. Now every drive but my parity drive was found, but they all said there was something wrong with the super block

 

reiserfs_open: the reiserfs superblock cannot be found on /dev/sdj.

Failed to open the filesystem.

 

If the partition table has not been changed, and the partition is

valid  and  it really  contains  a reiserfs  partition,  then the

superblock  is corrupted and you need to run this utility with

--rebuild-sb.

 

I didn't read anything into that though.

 

4) Decided to try to start the array again and mounted the disk. I added the disk and started the array. What I saw was that many disks did not mount right away (about 7 of them, possibly the ones that showed up unformatted before). These disks took almost 2 minutes to mount, which is certainly odd. Once they finally mounted Unraid has begun to rebuild disk3. I've attached my syslog.

 

So I think I might have screwed up before. What I should have done was:

 

1) stop the array

2) unassign disk 3

3) start the array

4) REBOOT/Powercycle

5) stop the array

6) reassign disk 3

7) start the array and rebuild disk 3

 

Still, the behavior of my array doesn't seem normal. Could I have mobo or SAS card issues or was all this trouble brought on by my mistake? Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm thinking at the very least I need to RMA disk3 (the seagate drive).

syslog-2012-04-29.txt