I'm sitting here at work about to puke because I'm worried that I'm going to lose all of my family pics and videos from my hard drive.  Until last night I have been running Unraid 6 on an Intel server tower with one 1TB Parity and one 1TB data drive.  I'll apologize right now for the lack of exact details and logs as I cannot access my tower since I am at work and will be here all day but need to get some info now so that I can develop my plan of action.

 

Ok, backstory: 

I had to restart my tower about a week ago after a power outage and noticed that the parity drive was not found on restart. Both of these drives were previously used drives and I have been planning to uprade the parity drive to a new(er) 4TB WD Red in order to prevent data loss should one of the older drives fail and to allow for expansion of my array size. Since the parity drive was showing unnasigned I went ahead and purchased a virtually new 4TB Red, pulled the old parity, inserted the new parity, restarted and began the parity build process last night before bed and saw that it should take around 12 hours.  I went to bed and dreamed of my newly revamped server and the wonderful times that were to come.

 

I wake up this morning at 5am to get ready for work, decide to check in on the parity rebuild process when I notice that it was finished... no, wait, not finished, stopped.  The parity showed an orange triangle and (I believe) saying that the parity is invalid.  The data disk stated "Device is disabled, contents emulated."  I immediately went into freakout mode and stopped the array in the hope that restarting it might do something (yes, I realize now that that was probably the worst thing that I could have done ) and restarted the array.  The parity status remained the same but (if I remember correctly) the data disk now shown unassigned. Just not there. I restarted the tower (I realize now that that was dumb too as I did not save the syslog that I now know we need) and the bios does not find the data disk at all and the parity drive is incomplete since, I assume, it did not complete the build process as the data disk may have fried in the middle of it. I've never had any issue with the data disk in the past and had a good health check on it when I started this evolution.

 

At this point I still have the old parity drive which I reinserted into the array just to see if it would be found on reboot, which it was and is currently there as an unassigned drive, which SHOULD have all of the data on it.  I've shut down the machine to allow things to cool off, though my drives usually read out at about 30 C, since I'm at work all day anyway.  I'm extremely concerned about data loss, obviously, and while most of whats on this data drive are movies and such there are thousands of family pics and videos that I absolutely cannot lose.  We had a Samsung laptop HDD go out on us in the past that lost birth pics of one of our daughters and my wife was devastated over that... which was the impetus of my Unraid server build.  I have to ensure that I don't lose this data and I am fairly hesitant to do anything more due to this concern without assurance that it can be retrieved with a secondary back up. 

 

So, as things stand I will be going home after work and assessing the data drive's connections and trying to figure out why the data drive is not showing up as being installed at all. I'm hoping that maybe jostling the drive bay a bit while moving parity disks around might have loosened something which cause the data drive to stop communicating.  If I cannot get it to revive is it possible to pull the 4TB parity and the 1Tb data drive, purchase a new 1Tb drive, reinsert and assign the old parity into its old slot and then rebuild the data drive from the old parity?  If so, what is the correct process?  If I CAN get the data drive to restart and reassigned to its former slot what do I do next?  I have a HDD portable case that I can put the data drive (or perhaps the old parity drive) into and try to copy the data to another location like cd's, but will the files be recognized in such a way that I can do that? This is the first real issue that I've had to deal with since setting up this server, I do not know the program all that well as I haven't had to learn it and I really haven't had the time with work, kids, and life so I'm not particularly adept at troubleshooting this stuff. 

 

ANY help and suggestions at this point are greatly appreciated.  I am sorry for not saving the syslog, but I didn't know that I would need to until I started reading up on troubleshooting this morning on the rideshare to work.  My desktop at home is an older dell optiplex which does not have nearly the storage space to do a hard drive backup to it and the cd drive will not write at all, so I'm just hoping against all odds that at the very minimum the data drive will work in the portable shell so that I can make a copy somewhere else. 

 

Please tell me that I can settle down and that this is fixable.  Thanks.

After checking your connections, boot up and go to Tools - Diagnostics and post the complete diagnostics zip.

 

If we can determine the state of your disks then we can make a plan. Did you even test any of your disks before trusting them in your array? Every bit of every disk must be trustworthy because every bit of every disk will be required if you need to rebuild a drive.

 

And you absolutely should never have only one copy of any files you consider irreplaceable. There are some other bad practices hinted at in your description but we can get into those later.

The drives all gave a good Smart checks at original installation as well as the last time that I looked at them. I am fairly certain that I ran a disk check on the original drives when first installed but that was over a year ago. I will double check connections and disk seating this evening. I simply did not have time to do anything else this morning before heading to work. 

If I cannot get it to revive is it possible to pull the 4TB parity and the 1Tb data drive, purchase a new 1Tb drive, reinsert and assign the old parity into its old slot and then rebuild the data drive from the old parity?

 

Since you were using only parity plus one data disk the parity disk is a mirror of the data disk, as long as the old parity is OK you can assign it as data disk and all your data will be there, you just need to do a new config first, if you do this try to copy the most important data first before doing a new rebuild, in case the old parity is not 100% healthy.

If I cannot get it to revive is it possible to pull the 4TB parity and the 1Tb data drive, purchase a new 1Tb drive, reinsert and assign the old parity into its old slot and then rebuild the data drive from the old parity?

 

Since you were using only parity plus one data disk the parity disk is a mirror of the data disk, as long as the old parity is OK you can assign it as data disk and all your data will be there, you just need to do a new config first, if you do this try to copy the most important data first before doing a new rebuild, in case the old parity is not 100% healthy.

 

Johnnie.black ----  I was thinking that too but in his second paragraph, he indicates that may be a problem with the parity drive as it went offline.  And then there was some issue with the data drive...  So some data recovery procedure may be necessary.

 

TheBaldFox ---  Can you provide tell what version of unRAID you are running now and what version you started with?  That information could help figure whether those drives are formatted with reiserfs or XFS.

 

Since you were using only parity plus one data disk the parity disk is a mirror of the data disk, as long as the old parity is OK you can assign it as data disk and all your data will be there, you just need to do a new config first

 

I'll still be checking the original data disk first, of course, but in the event that I cannot get it to work I will try this.  I was not sure how well this would work since I was under the impression that the parity did not have a file system on it.  If I unassign and pull the 4TB parity and the 1TB Data disk from the array, and leave the old 1TB parity installed what would the actual process for doing this new config? I know go to Tools --> New Config, then I would assign the old parity to one of the data disk slots and it will just see the old parity as a data disk without touching the files in any way?

Yes

 

TheBaldFox ---  Can you provide tell what version of unRAID you are running now and what version you started with?  That information could help figure whether those drives are formatted with reiserfs or XFS.

 

I can tell you for sure when I get back home this evening.  I believe that I upgraded to 6.2 the other day.  I also seem to recall originally purchasing Unraid 6 back in July of last year, but don't count on that until I can get home and verify. 

Tower system log, diagnostics log, and data disk smart report attached.  Tower is still running 6.1.9.  Smart short test shows no errors, but array sees data disk as unnassigned and unmountable and wants to format it.  4TB parity still shows as invalid. I will run a smart test on it as well after the data disk extended test is completed.  The old 1TB parity is not installed at the moment. 

tower-syslog-20160925-1530.zip

tower-diagnostics-20160925-1533.zip

tower-smart-20160925-1613_-_data_disk.zip

I would first try the old parity, if it has failed then try to fix filesystem on disk1 instead.

I think that you are right.  The long smart test on the data drive also returned no errors.  I will attempt a new config with the old parity drive and I'll check back in when I get a chance to try it out. I just don't understand why it sees the data disk as being unmountable.  Thanks.

I've been trying to do some more research on this as I find spare time at work.  I've been reading the Fixing File Systems tutorial here:

 

https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Check_Disk_Filesystems

 

It says in very large red letters:  Very important!!! Do NOT run these tools on the parity drive. It does NOT have a file system, and running ANY file system repair tool on your parity drive will likely corrupt it!

So, my concern here is that if the parity drive does not have a file system how could it then be used in a new config in a data slot?  Would Unraid recognize that it does not have a file system and attempt to build it or is it, like was stated, that it is a like-for-like copy of the data disk so long as there was only one disk to parity?

 

Another thought.  If I only insert the current data drive and then restart with no parity drives installed will it still show as unmountable and if so is there a way to run something like xfs_repair or other utility to repair it?  I think that it is written in XFS, but I'm not sure how to check that info with the logs. I've also read of an Unassigned Devices plugin that may let me view the data on the disk.  Would that work to allow me to view/copy the data from the disk into a windows format?

 

I'm sorry to keep asking so many questions, but I just really don't know Unraid/Linux well enough to figure this stuff out. 

Although it is generally true that a parity disk does not normally have a file system, the special case of a single data disk plus parity means that the parity calculations result in the parity disk ending up being a mirror of the data disk.  Therefore in this special case although there was no attempt to create a file system on the parity disk you effectively end up with one.

 

As soon as you add another data disk(s), then the statement about the parity disk having no file system becomes true.  Since only having a single data disk is unusual it is reasonable to make the statement about the parity disk not contains a file system since in the vast majority of cases this would be true.

Understood.  I have my new parity drive running the long smart test which should be done when I get home.  After that completes I will attempt the new config with the 1TB parity in the first data slot by its lonesome and see what happens.  Would you happen to know, should this be successful, if the file shares and etc be found as they should be by unraid and by devices on my network? 

 

 

Would you happen to know, should this be successful, if the file shares and etc be found as they should be by unraid and by devices on my network?

 

Yes.

 

 

 

 

Would you happen to know, should this be successful, if the file shares and etc be found as they should be by unraid and by devices on my network?

 

Yes.

User shares are simply the aggregate of all top level folders on cache and array disks, so if the folders are there the shares will be.

I want to thank all of you guys for helping me out and I am sorry for the late resolution post but I've been pretty busy at work.  Anyway, I followed the given advice, New Config'd with the old partition disk as the data drive which worked like a charm.  I them created a secondary backup of the data onto an external hard drive, which took a loong time thanks to slow usb write speeds, and rebuilt the parity with the new 4TB drive.  I have a second 4TB drive on the way and plan to use it as the new data drive.  I will be New Config'ing again, installing the new data drive and rebuilding the data to the new drive from the parity.  At the moment that gives me three seperate coipies of the data between the Old Parity, the New Parity, and the external hard drive. 

 

Thanks again for everyone's help.  If anyone has any other sage advice on how to create a better backup copy of a data disk by instaling a drive to the server and having unraid create a copy that would be usable in windows would be helpful for future backups. 

 

As was already mentioned earlier in the thread, you should ALWAYS have a backup copy of your data somewhere other than UnRAID.  A RAID system is NOT a backup.    With as little data as you have, you could easily maintain a backup copy of your data on an external drive.  I'd attach this to a Windows (or Mac ... whichever you use) system and simply backup all of your data from UnRAID to the backup drive.  Set up a synchronization utility and do this frequently (daily, weekly, etc. => and certainly immediately after you've copied any important new data to your server).

 

You should ALWAYS have at least 2 -- preferably more -- copies of any data you don't want to lose ... and a copy on a fault tolerant server only counts as ONE copy, even though it's more resiliant than if it was on an unprotected disk.