Lost disk ???

[barrygordon]

I was about to go to RC11 from RC 8 but ran into a problem. 

My hardware configuration has been running for about 1+ years. There are 12 disk slots and 9 of them are populated with 2TB drives. Up until yesterday the array consisted of a parity drive and 6 data drives.  All were visible and could be seen. Now drive 6 has disappeared and I am wondering how I get it back into the array without losing the data on it.  The wiki speaks about a reset button when discussing adding a disk, but I see no such button.

 

I can see all 9 drives if I stop the array. The first 6 (parity plus 5 data drives) are where they should be. The other three disks show up in the drop down lists.  If I assign them to array positions, then start the array I am afraid they will be cleared, as that is what the note by the start button says.  It states I should reset the array and run a parity check, but I don't see any way of doing that. I am not sure which of the three drives not in the array was my drive 6. Is there an easy way to find out?

 

I just noticed the New Config utility tab.  Is that what I need to do, that is stop the array put  all the disks in the array slots and hit new config's apply button?  Will it be that simple?

 

I am a pretty competent programmer, but I rarely deal with Linux and the Tower because it is so reliable.  Right now I have all plugins off the system until I resolve this.  What I want to do is migrate to RC11.

 

 

[Joe L.]

For drive 6 to have disappeared, something unusual must have happened.  Before you do ANYTHING, grab a copy of the syslog and attach it to your next post for analysis.

 

Yes, if you assign the new disks they will be cleared unless you set a new disk configuration. 

To set a new configuration you assign the drives as desired and then use (Utils->New Config) 

Once you press that button unRAID will immediately invalidate parity. 

 

Do not start the array until you see all BLUE indicators on the disks showing them as NEW.

When you then start the array it will calculate new parity data based on the data on the disks in the new configuration.

 

[barrygordon]

Thanks Joe, I am beginning to understand.  When I set the new config, the three disks showed up as un-formatted.  I expected perhaps two of them to show that way but was hoping  that one would be correct. Oh well I was lucky in that the disk I seemed to have lost had the least amount of data on it and I do have the originals (BR Discs Of everything that was on it.  I guess I just have to spend some time re-ripping, but time I have a lot of.

 

Before I do the restore of the data would you advise my moving to R11?

[itimpi]

Note that just because a disk shows up as unformatted in the unRAID GUI does not necessarily mean that the data cannot be recovered from it.  It will also show as unformatted if for any reason it failed to mount.  Quite often it is possible to recover such disks back to a mountable state using the linux 'reiserfsck' command.  It depends on whether you want to invest the effort to check that route out?