I've had my unraid server set up for about a week now, and it's been working pretty well. No major problems.

 

This morning, I changed out my parity drive with a bigger one (from 1tb to 2tb), and it finished the parity sync about an hour or so ago. It took maybe 8 hours, but I could check it from the web UI. So I took the old 1 tb parity drive and hooked it up after the parity-sync was done (after powering down the computer of course). I now see 3 disks. My new 2tb parity drive, my 500gb disk1, and the 1tb disk2 (with a blue color instead of green).

 

I got the message about how the new drive needed to be cleared, and how it will take some time to process. So I went ahead and started it, and it's processing. The web UI isn't available, which sounds right from what i'm reading, but I've got no idea how much time it will actually take for 1tb. I can still telnet into the machine. Is there a way to check the progress of the clear?

 

A normal clear thru the webgui should really not take -that- long. I expect when you read this it is finished. Next time consider using PREclear to do this, it does a MUCH better check on the disk and also sends you nice email notifications of its progress, it is easy to use:

 

 

Preclearing

 

Multiple pre-clearing cycles are good, 3 is a good number. They will however take a lot of time.

Note that if you start preclear by telnetting into the server from your pc the preclearing is dependent on your pc continuing to work (a reboot of your windows box will stop the preclear, this can be prevented by using "SCREEN" (it will make sure the preclear will continue even with your windows box shut down)

 

The following commands will have you covered on both (3 cycles with screen and sending reports on progress by email):

 

cd /boot

screen

./preclear_disk.sh -M 3 -c 3 /dev/sd?

Thanks.

 

I ended up stopping the process, installing screen and ran the preclear script. It took about 17 hours for a 1tb drive. I was then able to add it to the array. It took a bit of configuring to get the shares to show the new available size, but all seems to be working now.