I've added a new 2TB drive (Drive 4 in attached screenshot) to my existing array in order to replace a failing drive (drive 2), the array however is recognizing all drives and rebuilding Parity which is estimated to take around 2 months at the current rate (445K/sec).

Is the failing drive causing this and if so, do I just pull it from the system and if I do that, how do I get the disk 2 rebuilt on to disk4?

Thanks!

Server (full details in second attachment):

Intel Xeon 2.33Ghz

6GM RAM

Server (full details in this attachment):

Intel Xeon 2.33Ghz

6GM RAM

Not really clear how you got to this state.

 

The correct procedure would be to replace the failing disk with the new disk, assign the new disk, and then unRAID will offer to rebuild. Instead, you added a new disk to the array.

 

At this point, if the new disk has been precleared, then parity is valid and the new array is ready after a quick format of the new drive (with the failing disk still included). If the new disk has not been precleared, then unRAID would have to clear it for you, taking the array offline until it is finished. But none of these scenarios actually starts a parity check.

 

However you got here, a rebuild will not be possible. Perhaps you can save some of the data with further advise from some of the other experts around here.

Not really clear how you got to this state.

 

The correct procedure would be to replace the failing disk with the new disk, assign the new disk, and then unRAID will offer to rebuild. Instead, you added a new disk to the array.

 

At this point, if the new disk has been precleared, then parity is valid and the new array is ready after a quick format of the new drive (with the failing disk still included). If the new disk has not been precleared, then unRAID would have to clear it for you, taking the array offline until it is finished. But none of these scenarios actually starts a parity check.

 

However you got here, a rebuild will not be possible. Perhaps you can save some of the data with further advise from some of the other experts around here.

So unRAID scanned the new drive and then got me to format it  and then added it to the array, should I just cancel the parity sync and see if I can copy the data off disk 2 or do I need to get another 2TB drive and then pull disk 2 from the array and get it's content rebuilt from the parity drive?

Thanks for your help.

Did you preclear the new drive? How did a parity check get started?

 

It might be better to try to repair the failing drive filesystem before rebuilding it (if rebuild is even possible). I will leave that up to others to advise you. If you rebuild a corrupt file system you will just get a corrupt file system.

Did you preclear the new drive? How did a parity check get started?

 

It might be better to try to repair the failing drive filesystem before rebuilding it (if rebuild is even possible). I will leave that up to others to advise you. If you rebuild a corrupt file system you will just get a corrupt file system.

I didn't pre-clear, just stuck the new drive in the server, it asked me to let it scan the drive which I agreed and then asked to format which I also agreed, I don't remember being asked to start the parity check but the server has been switched off for quite a while so maybe it's the monthly parity check job that started it off?

Should I cancel the parity sync and start a filesystem repair on drive 2?

So the "scanning" phase you talk about was unRAID writing zeros to all of the new drive then? It probably took a while. But a preclear is really better because it helps you discover any problems with a new disk before you add it to the array. If you are lucky it won't have any problems to make your situation worse. I'm not sure what would be the best way to proceed from here. Might be just as well to consider parity invalid for your purposes and see if you can save the data some other way. Hopefully someone else will advise.

If the schedule monthly parity check was missed because the machine was switched off it would just wait until the next scheduled time. If you did a hard powerdown without stopping the array first then that will always cause a parity check. If you don't know how to stop the array safely then you should learn about this.

Paste a SMART report for disk 2.