One of my drives is disabled due to a write error. The array is still running as I have parity drive installed. How can I copy what should be on disk8 to a windows PC? I obviously cant access /tower/disk8 as it is disabled. I dont want to remove the drive and physically copy from it as it is compromised.

 

So basically I want what should be on disk8 copied to an external drive on my windows PC.

 

Hope this is possible as I dont have another drive to replace and I dont have enough space on the array to accomodate the data on the drive that is compromised.

 

Thanks!

One of my drives is disabled due to a write error. The array is still running as I have parity drive installed. How can I copy what should be on disk8 to a windows PC? I obviously cant access /tower/disk8 as it is disabled. I dont want to remove the drive and physically copy from it as it is compromised.

 

So basically I want what should be on disk8 copied to an external drive on my windows PC.

 

Hope this is possible as I dont have another drive to replace and I dont have enough space on the array to accomodate the data on the drive that is compromised.

 

Thanks!

Even though the drive is currently disabled (and not thus being physically written to), unRAID is emulating it from the combination of the other drives + parity  so the 'disk8' share still contains the files so that you can copy them.

 

As you have surmised the safest thing to do is copy of the files to another location before attempting any recovery action, and to minimise the chance of data loss you should copy the files on the compromised disk to another location as you currently envisage doing.

 

A disk being disabled does not always mean that a disk has physically failed (although that is a possibility). Any write failure to a disk causes unRAID to flag it as being disabled whatever the cause, and in many cases this can be a temporary glitch and thus recoverable.  Therefore once you have made your copy of the data that was on the disk you may want to try the following:

• Shutdown the unRAID system and check all cables are well seated as a loose cable may have been the cause of the disk being disabled.
  
• Power up the unRAID system again.
  
• Stop the array and unsassign the disabled disk (disk8).
  
• Start the array - it will warn you that your data is now unprotected due to the missing disk.
  
• Get a smartctl report on the failed disk.    If that report looks good then you can try and rebuild onto the same disk.  if not, then it will need replacing.
  
• Stop the array and assign (depending on results of previous step) either a replacement disk or the disk you are going to try to rebuild onto.
  
• Restart the array which will start the rebuild of disk8.  If it appears to complete without error then you probably want to run a  parity check to  confirm the array integrity.

In theory you could attempt the above recovery process without first copying off the data from disk8, but that risks data loss if the rebuild process fails for any reason so would not be the recommended way forward (although it would quite likely work OK).

Thanks for the reply

 

I have tried to access the disk share directly but it did not work while disk 1 did

 

I will try again later

 

Thanks

Confirmed. I cant access the disk8 share but can access all other disk shares?

Confirmed. I cant access the disk8 share but can access all other disk shares?

How do you have security configured on disk8?

I feel rather stupid now but the export share for disk8 was not enabled. Strangely it was the only drive that was not being exported. I have changed it and am now copying data from the share. Thanks to all for the help.