I am running the user script from RobJ to zero out the array. This particular drive is taking too long to clear, about 6 days so far, transferring at 10 mb/s. I have to leave town, so I needed to stop in and complete the last later, maybe after checking out cables. The problem is, I cannot shut down. The array activity still says it is zeroing out the array and updating the other drives and parity.

I don't know what to do. I am concerned if I force shutdown (reset or power button), it will destroy all of my data. Any thoughts?

Edited November 26, 2025Nov 26 by Airmaster
added detail on reset

9 minutes ago, Airmaster said:

zero out the array

Can you clarify what this means?

I am trying to shrink the array, and I was using the user scripts plugin to do that (https://forums.unraid.net/topic/48707-additional-scripts-for-userscripts-plugin/?tab=comments#comment-490808). Zero out the array so that the parity is maintained. Spaceinvader has a video about it.

Stop the array should do it.

I cannot stop the array. It just says "Sync filesystems" and it is still zeroing out the disk.

Open htop in terminal, look for a "dd" process, kill that

They won't seem to die.

I have identified two dd processes and I tried:

kill -9 2818167

kill -9 3051232

They are still running

The worst case is the button reset you mentioned. Going that route won't be too bad especially if you stop all the containers and vm you may be running.

I may do that if I have no other choices. The thing is it is writing to the two parity drives and the one I am clearing right now.

That's unusually high PIDs, might be wrong, just select them in htop and kill.

If you do the power button try a short press first, then wait 10 minutes. Long press will mess up parity if still writing.

Well with 2 parity drives.... I'd shut it down, unplug the drive you are zeroing, then start up. The drive will emulate and you should be able to move your data to the disks you plan to keep. After that, shrink the array.

Its writing to two parity drives plus an array drive at the same time. I cannot kill the processes, they won't die.

Question...if I just reboot the machine, and the disk I was zeroing was empty, could I just rebuild the parity from the other disks? If so, how?

If the other drive is already empty, yes.

Remove the empty drive and use 'New Config'. That will start like fresh with your remaining drives and start a parity build. Be sure to preserve the assignments you want.