May 9, 200818 yr I have just started to use Unraid Basic. I used a Maxtor SATA 500gb initially with no problem (disk1). To install the next disk I pressed the power button, waited for 10secs for shut down, and added a Seagate SATA 750Gb. On powering up, the array works with disk 1. On entering the config screen, I can take the array offline, and add the new disk into device 2. No parity disk.... Going back to the main page shows the new disk as blue, and the array stopped / invalid expansion message. I expected some a format disk button somewhere, but cant seem to find it! What next for this basic problem???!!!
May 9, 200818 yr The restore button needs to be used with extreme caution. It causes unRAID to forget all its parity information. Pressing it at the wrong time can cause you to go from a recoverable data scenario to an unrecoverable data scenario. The name of the button is misleading and has fooled more than one user. The only time pressing the restore button is absolutely safe is if you don't have a parity disk. (You have no parity protection, so losing it is irrelevant). Since you have no parity disk, I believe that if you press restore (you have to click a checkbox first) will allow you to add your second drive. The behavior you are experiencing is a slight bug that I think has been fixed in 4.3.
May 9, 200818 yr As bip999 said, this was a logic bug that only showed itself if you went to add a disk to an array that did not have a parity disk. Internally, since there was no parity disk, it was marked as being disabled. The new disk being added was considered a second "invalid" disk. The logic should not have cared if the parity drive was marked as disabled when it was not even assigned. The fix is to upgrade to the current 4.3beta6 (or 4.final, as it should be available any day now). It is very easy to upgrade, just download and unzip the new release on your PC, and then copy two files bzroot and bzimage to your flash drive. Then, reboot the unRAID server after using its management page to stop its array. (You can even rename the existing bzroot to bzroot42 and the existing bzimage to bzimage42 if you want to be able to revert to the older release for some reason. You do not need to reformat the flash drive, or reload syslinux, or change the volume label... those steps you did already when you configured your flash drive. All of your settings will remain as they were if you only replace the two files mentioned. Joe L.
May 11, 200818 yr Author Thanks Joe. It worked, although I`m a nit suprised that it had taken til version 4.2 for this to have come up. Surely most people start the same way. One drive first, then another etc.....
May 11, 200818 yr Thanks Joe. It worked, although I`m a nit suprised that it had taken til version 4.2 for this to have come up. Surely most people start the same way. One drive first, then another etc..... Hard to tell when it first was an issue. The code has probably been changed several times sine the original versions of unRAID. Besides, most people do have parity drives (its data protection is the whole reason most of us are running unRAID), and because of that, this issue was only recently discovered. To Tom's credit, it was fixed very quickly. Joe L.
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