I am confused on adding a new drive.  On the first rounds of 13 drives with the version 4.1, it came up showing the drives as unformatted, I told it format which only took a short while, then was ready to go.  Parity was off as I was loading all my movies.  The last drive parity was on and it came up and did a Clear where it took hours to write to the drive then did the format.  Now I am replacing a faulty drive so I stopped the system and shut it down.  Replaced the drive and when I brought it back up it immediately started the parity sync which takes 16 hours and would not let me format the new drive.  So I canceled the parity sync and then it let me format which just took a short time but did not do the long as hell Clear.  Now it is ready to sync.  Should I be doing something different?

 

Mickey

I am confused on adding a new drive.  On the first rounds of 13 drives with the version 4.1, it came up showing the drives as unformatted, I told it format which only took a short while, then was ready to go.  Parity was off as I was loading all my movies.  The last drive parity was on and it came up and did a Clear where it took hours to write to the drive then did the format.  Now I am replacing a faulty drive so I stopped the system and shut it down.  Replaced the drive and when I brought it back up it immediately started the parity sync which takes 16 hours and would not let me format the new drive.  So I canceled the parity sync and then it let me format which just took a short time but did not do the long as hell Clear.  Now it is ready to sync.  Should I be doing something different?

 

Mickey

When replacing a faulty drive unRAID does not need to format the drive.  It reconstructs the formatting based on the drive you are replacing.

 

At this point, you have confused the poor unRAID a bit.  It thinks the new drive has been there and is treating it as if it has existed forever. 

 

Do you still have a "red" indicator on the drive that had failed?

 

Basically, you should have just powered down, replaced the faulty drive, and powered up.  It should have detected the new drive, asked if the array should have been started, and then you should have let it do the reconstruction. (You stopped it, insisting on formatting and/or clearing being necessary.  When re-building a drive from a failed on, those steps are not needed)

 

So, post a syslog... and perhaps a screen-shot of your main page.  It will help us to figure out what to do next.  Whatever you do, DO NOT PRESS THE RESTORE BUTTON.  It does not restore anything, it instead wipes away your existing system.dat file and rebuilds it based on your currently configured and WORKING disks.  Pressing it with a failed disk will eliminate any possibility of recovering the data on the failed drive.

 

Odds are you will need to un-assign the newly replaced drive, reboot (to let unRAID forget it ever existed), re-assign the replaced drive, and then press "Start" after checking the I'm sure checkbox.

 

Joe L.

I had so much problems leading up to this and had already tried to rebuild it.  It had already been cleared and reformatted and then put back into the array but started having issues again.  At that point I decided to not give it another chance as I had already spent a month finding out what was missing and re-ripping them.  It originally did not have the parity drive on as I was initially loading the drives (per Tom's suggestion).  So after doing the clear/format, I did have parity on but since it immediately started acting up before I go much back on it, I decided it was not worth taking the chance that a restore would be good.  At this point, it did the format (took just a couple minutes) and I restarted the parity which will take 16 hours.  I have not desire to recreate anything automatically, I will just re-rip the movies.  Should I still bring it down and unassign it, etc. or just let the sync process finish?

Just let it finish...

 

Thanks, it is working......