Hey guys, came home and found one of my drives has a red ball. I followed the procedure in the wiki to start a reconstruction but it does not work.

 

I stopped the array, unassigned the disk, restarted the array, then stopped the array again and reassigned the disk, and restarted the array. However when the array restarts it does not recognize a new disk and commence rebuilding it simply shows the same drive serial number and the red ball again.

 

Also the array does not seem to be behaving normally, none of my shares are available on the network at all, all shares have green balls when viewed in the "shares" page of simple features, but none can be accessed on the network.

 

Should I remove the offending disk and preclear it, then reinstall??

 

(Offending disk is DISK 2, OS version is 5.0-rc8a.) Should also mention I did a short SMART test and the drive came back fine, I also disabled simple features and tried using the stock unraid gui to unassign/reassign the disk.

 

Side issue too - I tried to telnet in and copy the syslog to the flash drive as described in the wiki, but it failed due to the flash drive being apparently read only. What's the deal there?

 

 

 

 

 

syslog-2012-11-18.txt

Shut down, pull the USB drive and run a check disk on it in Windows.

Shut down, pull the USB drive and run a check disk on it in Windows.

 

Came back with no errors. I can also write to it when it is plugged into the windows machine. So who knows why the syslog could not be written.

One possibility... It the root directory of a FAT file-system has over 250 files (I think), it will not allow you to create another.  (A limitation of the FAT file-system)

This happens to me all the time on my older flash drive as I have lots of scripts I've written in /boot.

 

Joe L.

One possibility... It the root directory of a FAT file-system has over 250 files (I think), it will not allow you to create another.  (A limitation of the FAT file-system)

This happens to me all the time on my older flash drive as I have lots of scripts I've written in /boot.

 

Joe L.

 

Thanks, I'll try clearing out some old stuff that is no longer used.

 

Any ideas with the main problem though? How do I go about getting the disk to rebuild and my shares back on the network?

If the file on the flash drive is not able to be written, I'd guess it cannot "forget" the old drive.

 

Address that issue first, then go from there.  It sounds as if you were going about it correctly.

 

Joe L.

So I've made some progress.

 

Running chkdsk on the flash came back all clear.

 

I decided I was going to back up the flash and reformat it. While attempting to backup to my desktop the backup software skipped a file it was unable to access, a file called secrets.tbd. Everything else on the flash backed up ok.

 

I re-ran chkdsk this time specifying the fix file system errors and bad sectors options, it went through and did it's thing, once it was done, I opened the flash and the secrets.tbd had dissapeared - I assume chkdsk deleted it as it was causing problems.

 

I put the flash back into the server and booted it up. It booted up and showed the red ball on drive 2, however now my user shares were actually working and I was able to un-assign disk 2 and re-assign it. A data rebuild started - but quickly slowed to a crawl (700kb/s with 30day eta). So I put the drive in my desktop and ran WD's diagnostic tool on it, and it failed due to too many bad sectors - so it's going back under warranty. I've just bought an new 3TB to replace it anyway -pre clearing now.

 

I don't know what secrets.tbd does (it appears to be related to samba according to google). But the shares appear to be working normally (albeit in emulated disk mode).