Using an existing XFS Drive

[hooger]

Hello there,

 

I am trying to use a drive in my unRAID system that is full of data and formatted to XFS.  When in unRAID it says that it needs to be formatted, is there any reason why unRAID requires the drive to be formatted XFS by unraid itself and not from another system?

 

I'd really rather not format the drive as it is 6TB and nearly full, and I don't have the space to off-load it.

[RXWatcher]

Per Tom, its a partitioning issue:

 

Yes you can mix/match disk sizes (as long as parity, if present, is largest), as well as mix/match supported file systems (each data disk has its own file system).  "Supported" file systems include: ReiserFS v3, xfs, and btrfs.  ext2/3/4 is supported in our kernel but we haven't created the controls in the webUI for it.  There is another 'catch' though: at present unRaid computes block-level parity across "partition 1" of each device.  In order to maximize storage a decision was made long ago to create an 'unRaid-standard' partition layout on each device.  Bascially it expects a single partition 1 to exist on the device starting in sector 64 and extending to then end of the device (and for devices 2TB or smaller to be legacy MBR-style partition structure and for devices larger than 2TB to be GPT-style partition structure).  Unfortunately most devices 'formatted' outside of unRaid tweak the partition layout it subtle ways that make it 'compatible' - bottom line: most of these devices appear unformatted even though they might have a valid partition structure and file system.  Anyway this is some we plan to correct in a future release.

 

You would be best off using the unassigned plugin, mounting it up and copying the data off to your array and then reformatting the 6TB XFS disk and putting in into the array.

 

Thats what I ended up doing with my EXT4 disks.