Hey all, the only thing I can find is this topic from 2009; http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4707.msg43096#msg43096 .  I had pretty much done exactly this, saved of the .key file, formatted and recreated the USB from scratch.  The only exception is I did a delete partition and re-format the disks in another computer, not a pre-clear.  The reason for not doing the pre-clear this is an 18 x 3TB backup server and I don't want to wait a month or so to pre-clear that many disks.  Plus, these are all reasonably new, well vetted disks, pre-cleared on install and checked routinely. 

 

When I re-installed everything, much to my amazement the files were still there.  No shares obviously but the files were all there, but owned as Read-only file system.  I am assuming I need to re-do a fresh install on the USB again, but is there someway to do a pre-clear that doesn't involve all the write 0's and extensive checking that preclear.sh does?  I assumed using gparted to delete the partition and format to a new different FS should have been sufficient?

 

It probably isn't to far beyond me to just edit the preclear script, but I was hoping someone a lot more current or familiar could offer some suggestions.

 

Thanks

If you are adding disks previously used by unRAID to an array, then unRAiD recognises this and does not clear the existing data.    This can be very useful at times.

 

If you want to force the disks to be reset to a 'blank' state erasing current data then the easiest thing to do is to delete the existing partitions on the disk.    You can do this by doing it on another system, or by using the "gparted' utility from a telnet/console session.  No way is currently provided to do this via the GUI (I guess it is seen as to likely to be done in error).

 

Note that is definitely not necessary to pre-clear disks when setting up a new array if you are confident that the disks are OK.    Having said that, then pre-clear script does provide parameter options that allow you to run just a single phase (e.g. the write zeroes and pre-clear signature).  However in your case this does not seem necessary and simply deleting the partitions will achieve the effect you want and be MUCH faster.

Thanks, but I did exactly that.  Pulled the drives mounted them on my Mint box.  used gparted to remove the partition then even formated to ext3 just to make sure.  That is what seems so bizarre, the system seemed to still see them as old disks and somehow fairly successfully rebuilt the array. Another joker is the parity disk is a new disk.  I forgot about the preclear switches to do a minimal, I'll try that at least on a couple.