I have been using unraid Pro relatively problem free for 3 years. Today unfortunately I may have done something and lost some important data.

So far using unraid I have been able to stumble and search my way through the few issues I have had.

 

Today I attempted to upgrade to the latest version of 5.0. (I did not backup my flash drive). Oops. I could not get it to boot. I reverted to an old working version of my flash drive not thinking that 1 drive had been changed since that backup. It is the drive that contains my family pictures.

 

When I start unraid it shows orange ball and attempts to rebuild only to come back unformatted.

 

Is there a way to rebuild the drive from parity? Is that even an option?

 

I'm in trouble, can someone help. What can  I include to help diagnose this issue?

 

Mike

 

 

 

 

Smart Report for the drive in question

 

How do I find the actual version of unraid i'm using. The main page says 5.0?

 

MbMike

smart.txt

Is there a way to rebuild the drive from parity? Is that even an option?

The parity drive does not contain any data in the traditional sense.  What it provides is the ability to do a sector level restore of a failed drive back to the state it was at before the failure.  A rebuild ALWAYS uses parity plus the other good drives to achieve this.

 

If a disk says that it is unformatted before a rebuild, then it will also say the same afterwards!    The rebuild process is just a sector level copy back to the previous state.

 

Note, however, that unformatted status in unRAID frequently does not mean that the disk is really unformatted - just that unRAID could not mount it.  This is typically due to a failed write that left behinf some sort of file system level corruption.  The normal recovery process is

• Stop the array and then restart in Maintenance mode
  
• From a console/telnet session run a command of the form
  reiserfsck --check /dev/md?
  where ? corresponds to the disk number in the unraid GUI
  
• The command above will access the disk in read-only mode and check for corruption and suggest a recommended way forward.  Typically this means rerunning the reiserfsck command with a something other than --check as the option.  It is a good idea to check back here giving the output from the --check run to see if others think the recommended action makes sense as taking inappropriate action can lead to definite data loss
  

 

In terms of the unRAID version number it is the value displayed at the top right of the standard GUI.  The current v5 latest release is 5.0.6.

Here is the output from reiserfsck --check /dev/md8

 

I there a better way to output from telnet than a print screen?

 

Found this???

 

Recovering corrupted superblock

Each file system has a superblock, which contains information about file system such as:

• File system type

• Size

• Status

• Information about other metadata structures

If this information lost, you are in trouble (data loss) so Linux maintains multiple redundant copies of the superblock in every file system.

During check (reiserfsck --check /dev/sda1) if you get an error superblock was missing, use following command to fix superblock:

# reiserfsck --rebuild-sb /dev/sda1

Where,

• --rebuild-sb: This option recovers the superblock on a Reiserfs partition. Normally you only need this option if mount reports "read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs file system".

Caution: Do not run above command twice on same drive. You will damage your partition (data).

Final note

Next logical step is mount your partition /dev/sda1 and check for your data:

# mkdir -p /mnt/data

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/data

# cd /mnt/data

# ls

# ls lost+found/ -l

lost+found is a special directory where recovered files are kept by Linux/reiserfsck. You can examine these files and restore the data.

 

Is this worth a try?

 

MbMike

 

See check disk file systems in my sig. Run with --rebuild-sb.

I did and retrieved some of my pictures. There were a lot of files with no extensions that I couldn't figure out.

 

A few months ago that drive was swapped out for a much larger drive (40gig to 750gig), I still have the 40gig drive would there be anyway to re-instate that drive in another slot?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

I was able to re-mount the old drive and retrieve my data. Thanks to those to helped.

 

Mike