Hi,

I use a small 2,5" 250gb drive, I had laying around, in my array as a temporary solution because my 3tb drives are full and I don't want to buy another one at the moment.

The problem is that I needed a hard drive to test something on my mac, so I shut down my unraid server, took out the 250gb drive, formatted it and did my stuff. I thought unraid would rebuild the drive when I put it back into my server, but it didn't.

When I put it back in, unraid told me that it was unformatted and only gave me the option to format it, which I did. It took just a few seconds. There was no option to rebuild. After formatting and starting the array, unraid showed me 250gb free space on it. When I start the array with that drive disconnected, the shares that have previously been on that drive are also not shown.

It seems that unraid deleted all files that have been on that disk from the parity disk when I hit "format" instead of rebuilding them. Am I right or is there any possibility that the files are still on my parity disk and I could rebuild them?

best regards,

Otis

The only explanation I can come up with for the exact behavior that you said happened would be that you don't actually have a parity disk. Please post a zipped syslog, and a description of the rest of your array. A screenshot of the main array gui webpage would help too.

It would have taken a lot longer than a few seconds for unRAID to rebuild parity so that it no longer included the data for that drive. Your subject line is misleading and impossible considering your description of what happened.

 

unRAID will say a drive is unformatted if it cannot mount the reiser filesystem, which would have been gone after you formatted it on another machine.

 

unRAID will offer to rebuild a disk when you have replaced it with another disk, or you replace a missing disk.

 

It sounds like unRAID never knew the disk was missing and then saw that it was unformatted. Don't know what it would do in that case, but what you describe doesn't sound like it rebuilt parity. Can you think of anything you did that you left out of your description?

 

I don't know how (or if) you can recover from this. How to proceed probably depends on the version of unRAID you are running, which you didn't mention.

The array needed to be started with the drive missing in order to then be able to rebuild the contents on to the same disk. The disk appeared as unformatted and was then formatted by the OP. Run "reiserfschk rebuild-tree scan-whole-partition on /dev/mdX" replace the X with the correct disk number.

Thanks for the replies. It seems that you are right, that the problem was that unraid did not know that the drive was missing. The last thing I did after recognizing that the files are not showing up without the drive connected, was stopping the array because I didn't want my files to be further damaged.

I just wanted to run dgaschk's command and therefor reconnected the drive and unraid immediately showed a blue dot in front of it and gave me the option to rebuild from parity. At the moment it's rebuilding. I'll report back when it's finished.

Sorry for the misleading subject line. I rather meant something like "overwrite" than "delete". Couldn't it be possible that the parity files for the disk have been overwritten with parity for the empty disk? I don't know how to explain it better We'll see when the rebuild is finished.

I think I lost my Data. During the rebuild it showed that the disk was unformatted and it stayed unformatted after the rebuild was finished. I formatted the disk a second time, disconnected the drive and started the array again without the drive connected. After reconnecting the blue dot appeared again. The only difference now is that the drive is not shown as unformatted during the rebuild. Anyway, I think this doesn't matter as I already lost my data during the first formatting because I saw some writing to the parity disk after formatting. It seems very likely and logical to me that the parity information has been overwritten at that point. Shame on me...