Replaced failing drive - did I just lose data?


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I haven't had to deal with a bad drive in some time but it happened a few days ago.  Disk 7 started showing all kinds of errors so I bought a new disk, shut down the server and replaced the drive.  I don;t remember everything exactly, but I'm pretty sure I booted up and unRAID showed disk 7 missing so I stopped the array assigned the new drive and started the array.  I'm pretty sure all I did next was select rebuild data and let it do it's thing.  Frankly I was so sure of what I did that I let it go and didnt look at it again until today.

 

Now unRAID is showing all green dots but says that disk7 is unmountable and there is a prompt to format unmountable drives.  So if everything is green and it wants to format the drive, what happened to the original disk7 data in parity?  Is it now gone?  Did I do something wrong?

 

My log is attached.

wopr-syslog-20160105-1813.zip

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I think I know what's wrong and I did screw up.  I'm pretty sure the original file system was rfs and when I installed the new drive i selected xfs for it.  You can;t do that, can you?  It's dawning on me now that it can only rebuild the same file system as the original, huh?  Crap!  Is that recoverable?

 

EDIT:  under disk7 settings it is showing as xfs.  On the main page it does not show a file system for  disk7.  It just shows unmountable.

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I think I know what's wrong and I did screw up.  I'm pretty sure the original file system was rfs and when I installed the new drive i selected xfs for it.  You can;t do that, can you?  It's dawning on me now that it can only rebuild the same file system as the original, huh?  Crap!  Is that recoverable?

When you change the filesystem it gets formatted to the new filesystem. Maybe something can be salvaged but it won't be pretty. Did you read the wiki I linked?
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Pretty unclear at this point the exact details of what you did and what the system did. Do you know how long it took to do this "rebuild"?

 

Here's what happened:

 

1. disk7 started erroring like crazy.

2. shut down unRAID replaced that drive with brand new drive.

3. restarted unRAID and assigned new drive as disk7

4. went in to disk7 settings and selected XFS for FS

5. told unRAID to rebuild data.

 

According to the log, it took 11.5 hours to do the rebuild.  Nothing has been formatted since the rebuild and array has been running ever since.

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Unless something has changed (since when I messed up and lost data) you cannot switch the file system for a drive that is replacing a faulty drive with another file system!

Of course if you DIDN'T hit format yet (like I did), then I would think that your current config is just waiting for a disk 7 drive to be put in place to replace the one that is now missing.

Then a data rebuild could be initiated.

 

UnRAID will not let you change the file system of a drive for a rebuild, regardless of the preferred one that is set in your settings, disk settings, default file system.

So an XFS will be replaced with an XFS, RFS with and RFS, ....

 

Others should probably chime in before you listen to me on this topic, they are MUCH more seasoned at this!

So since you didn't hit format, and you only show an unmountable drive I think you're still hanging in there.

If you stop the array, remove the new disk 7, does it emulate the previous disk 7 with it's contents exported/available?

 

 

 

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If you stop the array, remove the new disk 7, does it emulate the previous disk 7 with it's contents exported/available?

I think that may be the key question.  If yes, than your data is still there.

 

Best luck,

craigr

Won't make a difference, because disk 7 is still set to mount as XFS, and that has nothing to do with whether the disk is emulated or not (the emulated drive should be an exact copy of the physical drive and vice versa)

 

This is the key:

 

Did you actually hit "format"?  If not try stopping the array and switching the file system back to rfs

 

Did you do this? Set it to RFS or Auto and it will bring your data back if you didn’t actually hit format.

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That looks to have worked.  It took a while to mount the disks but it finally did and the drive is now showing rfs and I am able to see it's contents.  Thanks so much guys!  I truly appreciate the help.

 

This does make me wonder about something though.  If I had lost the data I had no idea which files were actually on that disk.  Anyone have any suggestions for inventorying the contents of the disk shares/drives just in case drive data is lost?

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