Hi all,

 

I recently had a drive develop some errors so I removed it and recovered the data manually.

 

I now see "disk8 - Not installed" in the UnRaid disk status. The drive capacity is listed and this is being added to the total share size, even though the drive is not installed.

 

I've done a search on how to remove a disk (v4.7) and I see that you need to stop the array and do an "initconfig" via telnet.

 

How much risk is there that something can go wrong during this step and result in data loss? Would I be better off leaving this disk unassigned to the array (but still showing as allocated in the disk status view) until I install a new one?

 

Cheers,

Donovan

Actually you're taking FAR more risk by NOT doing it.  If you try to access disk8 right now -- to read or write to it -- it will WORK      That's the beauty of fault-tolerance.

 

HOWEVER ... that also means you're "running at risk".  You have NO fault-tolerance for any additional failures ... if another disk fails, you'll lose all of the data on that disk.

 

This would be a good time to upgrade to v5, but either way .. whether you do an InitConfig with v4.7 or a New Config with v5, you're not taking any risk with your data UNLESS you make a mistake in your disk assignments.    Be CERTAIN that you assign the correct disk to parity and (if you have one) to your cache drive.    Then when you start the array it will rebuild parity ... and you'll now be fault-tolerant again (i.e. protected against a disk failure).

 

 

... until I install a new one?

 

However, since you DO intend to replace the disk (I had missed that), you could simply go ahead and do that NOW ... and after the rebuild you'd have full parity protection for the complete array again.

 

But whatever you do, you need to do SOMETHING so you're not "running at risk".

 

Thanks for the explanation Gary - much appreciated.

 

I feel more comfortable about doing it now and getting the array back on track.

Good idea.  You don't want to have another disk fail and then realize you just lost all of its data !!  [Hopefully you have backups anyway, but it's still a hassle to have to restore everything]