As I mentioned earlier you have almost certainly destroyed the partition table on the data disk by running a reiserfsck --rebuild-sb with the wrong device name, and that will stop the disk being mounted on any system.

 

If you are lucky then someone (not me I am afraid as this is beyond my expertise level) will be able to chime in with a way to look at particular disk offsets to determine which was the data disk, and also where the partition started.  If that information can be determined then the partition table can be rebuilt.

 

i ran that on one of the two drives. at this point there is a 50/50 chance that it was on the old parity drive so there is still a 50/50 chance that the data drive is still recoverable, as it is untouched at this point.

Either way it is still unmountable so someone with a more low-level understanding than I have will have to help.

 

I don't really have a lot to add to this but I would like to try to fill in a few more details of how you got to this point in case it might be instructive.

 

You mentioned power outages. Did any of these occur while you were trying to fix your problems, or were they all before? (Get an UPS!)

 

When you restarted after the power outages, did you let unRAID complete the parity check that happens when you have an unsafe shutdown?

 

Did you run preclear on the new drives before trying to use them?

 

i had a UPS which eventually died and i had not yet replaced it

 

the best way to answer this is that before i removed those two drives, the entire array was up and running with valid parity and no issues. the drives were replaced as a precautionary measure.

You didn't actually answer all of the questions. If you don't want to for some reason then I will drop it.

 

i thought i had covered the partiy question in my previous response when i said "valid parity"

so, yes it did run a parity check

 

no, i did not preclear the new drives, but i am not sure why you ask that? i am focusing on the old drives at the moment, and how to get them to be readable under linux.

what significance would preclear have on this task?

no, i did not preclear the new drives, but i am not sure why you ask that? i am focusing on the old drives at the moment, and how to get them to be readable under linux.

what significance would preclear have on this task?

No significance for the old drives. Do you intend to go forward with these untested new drives or will you be trying to get the array going again on the old drives?

 

Might be a good idea to get a smart report for all drives.

Probably the simplest thing to do at this point is just try to put all of the drives in as data drives and don't assign any parity drive and see what you have. Any drives that don't mount may be parity, or may be corrupt data.

 

ok, this actually turned out to be a golden idea. I didn't want to mess with my existing unraid server, so i setup another computer with a new USB drive and unraid install.

put both drives in and assigned them both as data drives as per your suggestion.

lo and behold, the data drive came up fine and all of the data is there!

I am copying data from it now, and there was a reiser FS error that i will post here later. I want to grab everything i can from the drive before i do anything else.

 

so now, my question is: why is this disk readable in a new unraid server, but not on any linux computer? I want to make sure that my other disks would be readable outside of the array, this is supposed to be a feature of unraid, and in my opinion, an important one!

so now, my question is: why is this disk readable in a new unraid server, but not on any linux computer? I want to make sure that my other disks would be readable outside of the array, this is supposed to be a feature of unraid, and in my opinion, an important one!

Did you mount it internally to the other computer, or use a USB connection? Some USB adapters munge existing data by doing some internal translation in the SATA-USB controller and require a fresh format to work, or they just plain don't work correctly with drives over a certain size. Also, not all linux distributions include reiserfs support out of the box, it has to be downloaded and configured with the applicable package manager.

so now, my question is: why is this disk readable in a new unraid server, but not on any linux computer? I want to make sure that my other disks would be readable outside of the array, this is supposed to be a feature of unraid, and in my opinion, an important one!

Did you mount it internally to the other computer, or use a USB connection? Some USB adapters munge existing data by doing some internal translation in the SATA-USB controller and require a fresh format to work, or they just plain don't work correctly with drives over a certain size. Also, not all linux distributions include reiserfs support out of the box, it has to be downloaded and configured with the applicable package manager.

i am using it internally now, but will monkey around with it once i save all my data. I did try two different enclosures, one was USB2.0 and the other 3.0 so i figured at least one would work

i will try it under linux and windows internally (after i finish) and see if it works. i am just happy to have it working at this point

so now, my question is: why is this disk readable in a new unraid server, but not on any linux computer? I want to make sure that my other disks would be readable outside of the array, this is supposed to be a feature of unraid, and in my opinion, an important one!

Did you mount it internally to the other computer, or use a USB connection? Some USB adapters munge existing data by doing some internal translation in the SATA-USB controller and require a fresh format to work, or they just plain don't work correctly with drives over a certain size. Also, not all linux distributions include reiserfs support out of the box, it has to be downloaded and configured with the applicable package manager.

 

^^^

 

Everything jonathanm wrote is 100% accurate and most likely the reason you had some challenges mounting it on a foreign system.  It's so nice to have a community of knowledgeable members that pass this information along.  Thanks jonathanm!