lovswr Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Ok, after several hard drive failures (to include the parity drive) I just want to start over anew. The two shares that I really need , my itunes & pictures have been moved off of the array about a month ago. Now I'm stuck with an orange ball next to the parity disk (which is reports as being invalid) & I just want to wipe everything out (without deleting my license of course) & start with 5 empty data drives, 1 parity, & 1 cache drive each. Thanks in advance. edit: whoops this is unRAID 4.7 Link to comment
BetaQuasi Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 Just copy your license file off the USB stick, format the stick and start the install process over from the beginning. Link to comment
tyrindor Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 There is absolutely no reason to wipe the data drives, that is a huge waste of time. Just transfer the "pro" file off the USB stick, format it, download unRAID follow the instructions to install it, transfer the "pro" file back, and then config all your settings again. Make sure you set your old parity drive to the parity slot. P.S. if your having constant hard drive failures you probably aren't preclearing/testing your drives before adding them. I have ~40 drives on 2 servers and haven't had a failure in over a year, I preclear them for 24-48 hours before adding them to the system to weed out bad drives. In my experience, about 1 in 10 hard drives have minor to major issues right out the box. Link to comment
lovswr Posted June 25, 2012 Author Share Posted June 25, 2012 There is absolutely no reason to wipe the data drives, that is a huge waste of time. Just transfer the "pro" file off the USB stick, format it, download unRAID follow the instructions to install it, transfer the "pro" file back, and then config all your settings again. Make sure you set your old parity drive to the parity slot. P.S. if your having constant hard drive failures you probably aren't preclearing/testing your drives before adding them. I have ~40 drives on 2 servers and haven't had a failure in over a year, I preclear them for 24-48 hours before adding them to the system to weed out bad drives. In my experience, about 1 in 10 hard drives have minor to major issues right out the box. Thanks for the instructions. Yes I preclear every drive. Over the past year, I have had a bad motherboard, bad USB jump drive; the recommended 8 port SATA controller has failed, not to mention my parity drive & one of my data drives failing over the past few days (both Western Digitals) while preclearing my two new Samsung drives. I have swapped out every SATA cable at least once (some up to 3 times) & I do have an UPS on this box. I have 6 fans in a good Thermaltake case. Frankly I have begun to doubt the viability of unRAID as a proven product because of the virtually continuous failures I have had. I managed to build my first PC, Debian 1.2, I think, from a CD-ROM that came with computer gamer in the summer of 1996 so I know that I have enough hardware experience to make this work. I have never had a box that was so persnikity in my life. Yet I continue. Thanks again for the help. Link to comment
tyrindor Posted June 25, 2012 Share Posted June 25, 2012 There is absolutely no reason to wipe the data drives, that is a huge waste of time. Just transfer the "pro" file off the USB stick, format it, download unRAID follow the instructions to install it, transfer the "pro" file back, and then config all your settings again. Make sure you set your old parity drive to the parity slot. P.S. if your having constant hard drive failures you probably aren't preclearing/testing your drives before adding them. I have ~40 drives on 2 servers and haven't had a failure in over a year, I preclear them for 24-48 hours before adding them to the system to weed out bad drives. In my experience, about 1 in 10 hard drives have minor to major issues right out the box. Thanks for the instructions. Yes I preclear every drive. Over the past year, I have had a bad motherboard, bad USB jump drive; the recommended 8 port SATA controller has failed, not to mention my parity drive & one of my data drives failing over the past few days (both Western Digitals) while preclearing my two new Samsung drives. I have swapped out every SATA cable at least once (some up to 3 times) & I do have an UPS on this box. I have 6 fans in a good Thermaltake case. Frankly I have begun to doubt the viability of unRAID as a proven product because of the virtually continuous failures I have had. I managed to build my first PC, Debian 1.2, I think, from a CD-ROM that came with computer gamer in the summer of 1996 so I know that I have enough hardware experience to make this work. I have never had a box that was so persnikity in my life. Yet I continue. Thanks again for the help. I do not believe your problem is unRAID. I've have 2 unRAID servers with 22 drives in each for about 3 years. I have had a total of 2 hard drive failures, and no other hardware failures. I've had 2 bad SATA cables but switched over to a SAS case/cards about a year ago. I would try possibly replacing the PSU, it could be faulty and causing some voltage spikes or something. Note, that if the PSU is faulty that damage is likely already done to the hardware, so replacing it and then still having hardware failures is likely. New hardware would last longer if this was indeed the case. I use Corsair AX850s in both of my servers, very high quality PSUs. Make sure your UPS is pure sine. Most modern PSU companies require it, and they even void your warranty if they find out you aren't using a pure-sine UPS (according to the manual anyway). I use these, I currently have 4 of them in my house and while they are a large investment I could not live without them anymore. You would not need a 900W model, but I prefer longer battery life. If you are using WD green drives, you should be using WDIDLE3 to set the idle timer to 300 seconds. I would not suggest disabling it, as I had some drives have issues with that. If you do not, LLC counts on the drives will skyrocket over time and lower the drives lifetime. This is a fault in these drives themselves, check google out for more information it's pretty well documented. It's also possible that none of these things are the issue and you are just having very bad luck. unRAID can not cause hardware failures/damage. Link to comment
lovswr Posted June 25, 2012 Author Share Posted June 25, 2012 edit: by "Pro files" do you mean the license? Yes, I thought it might be the power supply too. So I bought a new one the same day I got the UPS (which was the second cheapest apc, about 55 bucks as I seem to remember...could this be the culprit?) Anyway, I just upgraded to the latest beta, RC-3. I did find another faulty hard drive. It will not post at boot so I have removed it, but unraid is insisting that it be there. I just want to force the parity to build with the drives that I have. Is there any way to do that? Link to comment
lovswr Posted June 26, 2012 Author Share Posted June 26, 2012 Click on Utils->New Config. Thanks, it's rebuilding now. Link to comment
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