Hello All,

 

I just upgraded to 5.05 tonight. After a reboot, one of my disks came back with a red ball. smartctl says the disk is good. reiserfs util wants to rebuild it. I'm getting a "filesystem unknown" on the drive from Unraid. To my question, is it better to just format the drive outside of unraid and rebuild it from parity? or let the Reiser util attempt to rebuild it? Anybody recover a red ball disk? if so, how?

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

drive.txt

Hello All,

 

I just upgraded to 5.05 tonight. After a reboot, one of my disks came back with a red ball. smartctl says the disk is good. reiserfs util wants to rebuild it. I'm getting a "filesystem unknown" on the drive from Unraid. To my question, is it better to just format the drive outside of unraid and rebuild it from parity? or let the Reiser util attempt to rebuild it? Anybody recover a red ball disk? if so, how?

That is not the way parity works!  If you try and rebuild then you will get back the disk with the same file system corruption as you currently have. 

 

Using reiserfsck is the only way to recover from file system corruption.

 

You can put the array into maintenance mode and then run reiserfsck against the relevant /dev/md? device.

 

If you have a spare disk of the requisite size, then a slightly safer (albeit slower) method is to rebuild onto the replacement disk.  This should give you a disk copy in the same state as, the one that is currently showing as unformatted.  You then run reiserfsck against the rebuilt disk as mentioned above..  The advantage of this is that if for any reason something goes wrong with the rebuild you have the original disk in its current state for data recovery purposes.

I should probably have provide a little more information. There's no errors in the unraid array so no file corruption. Spinrite called it a cabling error. I moved the drive to another spot in the cage until I can replace the sata cables and began the rebuild. We'll see if it comes back. It wasn't failing, it just didn't initialize on reboot.

I should probably have provide a little more information. There's no errors in the unraid array so no file corruption. Spinrite called it a cabling error. I moved the drive to another spot in the cage until I can replace the sata cables and began the rebuild. We'll see if it comes back. It wasn't failing, it just didn't initialize on reboot.

If it comes back as 'unformatted', then you DO have file system corruption.  I inferred you were seeing this from the comment about reiserfsck wanting to rebuild it. However it comes back without the need for reiserfsck then that is better.