While moving I appeared to lose my thumb drive and so had to get a new one. Now I can't remember which drive was the parity drive in the array. All drives are 2TB, some are newer so I can narrow the newer models out by their model number, but that still leave 5 out of 11 drives to choose from. How do I tell which drive contains the parity data to initialize unRaid. I'm still running 4.7 at the moment.

 

I know I've seen the answer on the forum before, but can't seem to find it today.

I say if you use windows just get the app to read rasefs and see which drive is not formated.

all other drives will be formated and have a partition on them.

 

but you might have a bigger problem, in v4.7 the drive slot position is also important.

and you do not know where each go you might loose  data.

 

While moving I appeared to lose my thumb drive and so had to get a new one. Now I can't remember which drive was the parity drive in the array. All drives are 2TB, some are newer so I can narrow the newer models out by their model number, but that still leave 5 out of 11 drives to choose from. How do I tell which drive contains the parity data to initialize unRaid. I'm still running 4.7 at the moment.

 

I know I've seen the answer on the forum before, but can't seem to find it today.

As long as all your drives are error free, it's no big deal. Just assign ALL the drives to data slots, MAKE SURE THERE IS NO PARITY DRIVE ASSIGNED, and start the array. All the data drives should mount just fine, and be browsable.  There should be one drive that shows unformatted, that's your parity disk. Make a note of which drive should go where, stop the array, set a new config (with 4.7 it's a command line thing) and assign all the drives to the correct slots, being very sure which is the parity drive. Start the array, and it will recalculate parity and write it to the drive that you assigned.

 

If you think you may have a failed drive, don't do this. It will eliminate any possibility of recovering it.

 

Data drives can be assigned to any slot, it's only after the array is up and healthy with calculated parity that it becomes important not to change slots in 4.7.

Be VERY careful -- do NOT check the box that allows UnRAID to format the unformatted drives. 

 

The safest way to do this is to attach the drives to a Windows box with the free Linux Reader driver; and see which ones have readable data on them.

 

http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

 

But assigning them all as data drives will work okay -- it may, however, result in corruption of your parity drive.  As long as everything is okay, that's not a big deal -- you'll just be running "at risk" until the initial parity sync is completed.

 

I'd also take advantage of this opportunity to upgrade to v5.0.

 

Thanks guys. Since I've got a little Linux experience and didn't feel like pulling each of the 11 drives out to verify which had the parity partition, I just went through each of the drives issuing the commands:

 

mount -t reiserfs -o ro /dev/sd<x>1 /mnt ; ls /mnt ; unmount /mnt

 

I went through a (flash), and the b-l (lower case L) and eventually found it on G. The parity is rebuilding now. In a little less than a day it should be complete.

 

Thanks for the help.