I cranked down the screw in my controller card that serves several drives.  One disk became disabled from this mistake I made.  I took the card out, cleaned it and re-inserted it.  Now all is working well.  The card can see the drive but it is disabled.  I can choose the drive from the dropdown list but it stays disabled.

 

I tried the remove drive, start array, powerdown array, reinstall drive and power up array to get it to rebuild, but no go.  The drive shows, but with the dreaded red 'x' and "device is disabled, contents emulated.

 

Do I reformat the drive in a windows machine and reformat in raid and rebuild?  I have a backup of it's contents in Windows format.  I know the data is still good on the drive, it's just that I messed with the cabling much too much.

 

Can I force a parity rebuild?

 

I'm stumped.  Help!

Stop The array, change that disk to be not installed.  Start the array, stop the array.  Change that disk to be the appropriate disk.  Start the array and it will be rebuilding onto the disk.

Got it.  I left out a step.  It's now rebuilding.  Thanks.

yes

Rebuild on a 3TB drive didn't take very long (less than 15 minutes???).

 

I still have the red x but my bubble notes that pop up say array is now good with 0 disk errors.

 

Smart report for that disk says 0 errors.

 

It still says drive is being emulated.  Is there a way to force a partiy check (like in version 5).  Would that work by having it correct any errors there are?

 

Can't imagine stopping and starting the array would help at this point. 

 

How do you start a parity check in version 6?

 

 

From the Main Tab/Screen under Array options - second Option down hit that button.

Rebuild on a 3TB drive didn't take very long (less than 15 minutes???).

 

I still have the red x but my bubble notes that pop up say array is now good with 0 disk errors.

 

Smart report for that disk says 0 errors.

 

It still says drive is being emulated.  Is there a way to force a partiy check (like in version 5).  Would that work by having it correct any errors there are?

 

Can't imagine stopping and starting the array would help at this point. 

 

How do you start a parity check in version 6?

It didn't rebuild properly.  Probably the disk dropped offline.  You should post your diagnostics

 

I just am NOT getting it.  I'm not seeing it.

 

What diagnostics would be best.  SMART report says disk is good.  No errors.  Why is my array still unprotected?

 

I have Array Devices, Boot Device, and Array Operations.  I have started, array unprotected.  In version 5 there was a 'parity check' section.  In this version there is not.

With a disk disabled, there is nothing for parity to check while its emulating the contents of the disabled drive.

 

Assuming you followed the directions I posted a couple of messages above, the rebuild failed for some reason.  Go to Tools / Diagnostics and post the file.

Diagnostics file.

 

I see the write errors for disk 6 near the end of the sys log file.  Can't imagine disk is actually bad since this all started with me man-handing the controller card. 

 

I do have a disk at work I could swap out with it to rebuild on a new disk.

 

Should I go that route?

tower-diagnostics-20151126-1840.zip

Disk 6 suffered a write error at the start of the rebuild (preceded by a cryptic error from the driver) hence why unraid disabled the drive again.  Smart does look good on that drive, so I would reseat the cabling to the drive, as some googling found that it *may* be the cause.

I had an almost identical error for the past few weeks. Ended up being a bad power connector. I had replaced the disk, sata cable and port. Drive came right back on after I replaced power. Rebuild on 5tb took 24 hours.

I tried a second rebuild.  Went on overnight.  All is back to normal!

 

Thank you for your help.  I now understand that if a disk is disabled, you can't run parity.  The disk must be rebuilt first.  Will mark this as solved.

... Smart does look good on that drive ...

 

??  Not sure what you're referring to.  Everything looks fine -- no pendings, no reallocated sectors; and all significant parameters still at their max value (100 or 200)

 

I tried a second rebuild.  Went on overnight.  All is back to normal!

 

Thank you for your help.  I now understand that if a disk is disabled, you can't run parity.  The disk must be rebuilt first.  Will mark this as solved.

 

Glad all's restored okay.  For future reference, another alternative, given that you were confident in the drive's contents AND had backups of the data (just in case), would have been to just do a New Config and assign all the drives as they originally were.  This would have forced a new parity sync.    But it was actually probably a better choice to do the rebuild, since if the drive had in fact been bad you could have still rebuilt the data to a new drive.    [Less important since you had good backups, but nevertheless a factor.]

 

... Smart does look good on that drive ...

 

??  Not sure what you're referring to.  Everything looks fine -- no pendings, no reallocated sectors; and all significant parameters still at their max value (100 or 200)

 

Like i said, smart does look good

 

And my justification for another rebuild was that the 2tb was known to be good and no real good reason to do a new config and rebuild the parity and then rebuild the 4tb.  That way the parity drive never got touched.  Less risk in my mind

Clearly had a senior moment and miss-read your comment => I think the caveats following the comment on SMART made me think you had said "doesn't" ... even though you clearly said "does" 

 

I agree -- as I noted above -- that rebuilding it was the best approach.

 

Clearly had a senior moment and miss-read your comment => I think the caveats following the comment on SMART made me think you had said "doesn't" ... even though you clearly said "does" 

 

I agree -- as I noted above -- that rebuilding it was the best approach.

Lol and i had a middle age moment (sometimers?) And misread the reply thinking you wanted to do a new config.

New config would rebuild parity and lose any writes that had been made to the emulated drive, possibly including some that would have been required to keep the filesystem intact, so rebuilding data is definitely preferred.