Help, My setup is WD Black 4TB Parity Disk 1 is WD Red 3TB Reiserfs Disk 2 is WD 1TB reiserfs - I have precleared a WD Red 4TB stopped array swapped 3TB with the 4TB it formatted as XFS and then did a parity sync - when finished I have no files on the 4TB Red - what have I done wrong

When you do a parity sync, the resulting disk should appear the same as the old one. Not sure what went wrong, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the correct way to switch disk formats .

I havent done this but I think what you should have done is a "rebuild" not a sync, but your data should still be on the 3TB drive you removed so you should be able to put that back in and do a sync then do the swap and do a rebuild.

A rebuild would have rebuilt the missing/replaced drive with reiserfs on the new drive.

I'm not sure if placing a formatted drive in that position and doing a parity sync was appropriate.

 

 

Usually you have to shutdown.

Remove / disconnect the drive.

reboot

let unraid see the missing drive

stop

shutdown

put the new drive in (precleared ONLY. No high level format).

boot

and let parity rebuild it on the newer drive (it will have the old format and expand it to the size of the drive).

 

 

As suggested, if you have the old drive, you can connect it and manually mount it.

Then rsync the old drive onto the new parity protected drive.

Ok tried adding 3TB back into original slot gave me an error that I cannot put smaller drive in to replace 4TB

Do manually outside the array possibly with snap if you need further assistance.

Then rsync the data manually.

snap plugin I think I can figure out but rsync is there a link on how to install and set it up - this sounds like its getting past my technical knowledge

you can try and use midnight commander which is part of unRAID.

 

rsync is part of unraid and pretty easy, it's like an advanced copy command

Look on the forum and google it.

 

The exact syntax escapes me at the moment, but it would look like

rsync -avPX /mnt/diskx/ /mnt/disky

It was not clearly stated in any of the earlier messages, but you cannot change the format of a disk and expect any data on the disk to survive the change.    Therefore when you changed the format of the new 4TB drive to XFS that would have the effect of wiping any data on it.

 

Since you still have the 3TB drive which will still have ots data on it then the easiest thing to do would be to mount it outside the array (assuming you have a way of plugging it in (spare SATA slot or a SATA/USB adapter and copying the files onto the new 4TB drive.

Ok installed snap mounted drive and are currently transferring files using midnight commander thankyou everyone for your help