So i messed with to many things at once and hosed my flash drive.  Anyway, i have everything set back up and it boots fine now but none of my drives are assigned.

 

I am just wondering what the best course of action is so that i do not lose the data on the disks?

 

Thanks

So i messed with to many things at once and hosed my flash drive.  Anyway, i have everything set back up and it boots fine now but none of my drives are assigned.

 

I am just wondering what the best course of action is so that i do not lose the data on the disks?

 

Thanks

Do you remember which drive was the parity drive?

 

If yes, then it is easy... just assign it to the correct slot in the array.  The others are not as critical, other than any shares you once created on disk1 might now end up on disk 3 if you transposed the data disk assignments.  You will not lose data, but the share mappings on PCs might be wrong if you mapped to a "disk" share.

 

If you do not remember which disk is parity, then do NOT assign a parity drive, at least not at first. 

Assign only data disks... but remember the parity drive is one of your biggest drives.  (in my array, only two drives are 1TB, the others are all smaller, so in my case, the parity drive MUST be one of the two larger drives)  The one "disk" that shows up as "unformatted" is probably the parity disk.  DO NOT FORMAT IT.  Instead, un-assign it from a data slot and re-assign it as the parity slot.

 

Even if you do not remember your parity drive, if you have posted a syslog on this forum it might have a record of your drive assignments.  You might download your own syslog file and look.

 

When you have all the disks assigned you should be able to start the array.  It will commence to computing parity as if you completely rebuilt your flash drive it has no idea you ever computed parity in the past.

 

Joe L.

OK, that is what i figured.  I know which one is the parity as it is the only 1TB drive in the array right now.  I pretty much knew the layout of the drives but i have 2 WD that are very similar and i forgot to get where they were in the array.  Since both of these drives are full of DVD .iso i don't really car what order those two are in.

 

Thanks for the help Joe

To avoid rebuilding parity, see the Trust My Array procedure.  After you have re-assigned every drive, then this procedure will restore Green balls to the whole array.