Hi there,

 

I've been using my unraid for 2 weeks now, and an hour after i started a parity check it stopped checking and shows disk 8 with a red dot.  Model / Serial No. shows up as 'Not installed'. I'm a bit scared now. What should i do and not do to not lose any data?

 

After getting my syslog i rebooted and now the drive is showing up as a blue dot 'Disabled disk replaced'

 

as my syslog is over 600kb i've uploaded it to 2shared:

http://www.2shared.com/file/9047155/daf88e70/syslog-2008-11-10.html

here's my smartctl report

check your power and sata cable for a loss or a bad one.

I also had this problem, then I saw my PSU was only at 300W, I did a replacement with a 650W.

//Peter

This one looks like just one bad SATA cable to Disk 8.  Throw it in the trash, and replace it with a good SATA cable.  We only recommend using the best quality SATA cables you can find, because that seems to be the weak point of the SATA scheme.  Unfortunately, it is not always easy to determine what the quality of a prospective cable may be.  Locking connectors and a claim to support SATA II and a reputable dealer seem to be the best factors in acquiring good SATA cables.  Many recommend MonoPrice.

 

Once you have replaced the cable, use the Trust My Array procedure to put your array back in top shape, without having to rebuild parity or Disk 8.  Then let the parity check complete.  There was no evidence of any problems with Disk 8 that I could see.  The SMART report did show a UDMA_CRC_Error_Count of 5916 CRC errors, the direct result of the bad cable, not the fault of the drive.

 

Just for an FYI, you have 2 drives with a Gigabyte HPA, Disk 2 and Disk 7, so you probably pulled them from a Gigabyte based system before.  Since neither is the parity drive, there is nothing you need to do or worry about.

I checked my cabling and didn't find any problems, so i went on and rebuild the drive wich has completed now after 12 hours. Data on the drive seems to be fine, no corrupted files or anything. I will replace the sata cable with another one just to be sure.

 

I learned about the gigabyte hpa after i cleared those drives but never bothered to remove the hpa as i'm probably going to upgrade to a 2TB par drive in the near future.

 

My PSU also hasn't much more room for expansion i noticed even though half my drives are green power ones. My PSU is a Antec Neo HE 430watt.

 

Many thanks for the help

I checked my cabling and didn't find any problems, so i went on and rebuild the drive wich has completed now after 12 hours. Data on the drive seems to be fine, no corrupted files or anything. I will replace the sata cable with another one just to be sure.

Bad cables look just like good cables, unless you can see actual damage in the connectors, such as bent leads.  I should have added a little more detail, such as that your syslog was over 18MB and 273,337 lines long (either the third or fourth longest syslog I have ever seen), and over 272,000 of them were directly due to that bad cable or the connectors associated with it.  Your primary error code for all those error sequences was BadCRC, and whenever you see BadCRC prominently, always think BadCable.  Thankfully, a bad cable does not cause data corruption.  The data packet transfers are retried until correct.

 

I learned about the gigabyte hpa after i cleared those drives but never bothered to remove the hpa as i'm probably going to upgrade to a 2TB par drive in the near future.

As long as you don't use a Gigabyte motherboard, you don't have to be concerned at all, it won't affect you in any way (unless you tried to use one of them for a parity drive in another server).