Upgrade from 4.7 to 6.2 - Devices unassigned and Parity ready to be "erased"?

[keyman33]

Hi team,

 

I've been following the great instructions on how to upgrade my 4.7 to 6.2 and everything has worked well and I'm able to boot up. Note that I did the full reformat of the flash, and copied the network.cfg, ident.cfg, share.cfg, and shares/*.cfg and that's all.

 

However, when I enter the GUI, all my existing devices are un-assigned.  I have tentatively re-assigned them back to their correct original homes without starting the array, but this message appears next to the parity drive "ALL DATA ON THIS DISK WILL BE ERASED WHEN ARRAY IS STARTED"

 

While I'm 90% sure this is ok to occur, and that no erasing of my data on my *data* drives will occur, I thought I'd better be 100%, hence my message to you.  As well, there is no mention of this occurring in the troubleshooting section of the guide, nor any other posts that I can find on this subject.  Obviously the last thing I would want to happen is a complete wipe-out of all my data after the upgrade.

 

Thanks!

[JorgeB]

It's just a warning for users to double check in case they assign a data disk to a parity slot by mistake, in your case you should check the "parity is already valid" box before starting the array to maintain your parity, if you don't a new parity sync will begin, you won't lose any data but you'll be unprotected until the sync finishes.

[RobJ]

I suspect that's a cautionary warning that has been added recently.  It's simply saying the drive will be completely overwritten, therefore *if* there's anything worth saving on the drive, this is your last chance!  If it truly is your parity drive, then you expect that, and can proceed.  If it's at all possible you have assigned the wrong drive, then you will want to double check all of your assignments, make sure they are perfect.

 

It's often suggested to assign everything but your parity drive and start the array.  Then you can check if all of your data disks are correct, and assume that the unassigned one must be the parity drive.  If any of them aren't mountable, then it's likely *that's* the parity drive (although it could be a data drive that's unmountable for some other reason).  If the drives are all correct, and mountable with file systems, then you can stop the array and assign the parity drive and restart.

 

The parity drive itself does not have any of your data on it, so that's somewhat of a generic message.

 

Edit:  Johnnie has already said all the most important things.

[keyman33]

Great. Thanks to both of you!  All sorted and working fine just by continuing the process.

 

Just for general feedback information, the "parity is already valid" box did not disable the warning message, though I had expected it to.

 

So, from RobJ's note, I mounted without assigning parity and I could see all drives were intact and working. Then I stopped the array, and wanted to enable the "parity is already valid" box, but that option was no longer presented to me.  So I just assigned the parity drive and ran the parity check. No big deal.

 

thanks again! Looking forward to enjoying my upgrade.

[trurl]

Glad you got it sorted. For future reference, and anyone else that might read this thread, the file that you missed copying from your original install is super.dat. That is where your drive assignments were stored.