February 5, 201016 yr First of all.. I know I've done what I need to do all in the wrong way now, but for the purposes of this question, please ignore that fact... :-) I'll deal with my upgrade after I'm sure everything is as good as possible... SO.... I've got this UnRaid with five 1 tb drives.. (4+parity of course) They were filling up, so I went and bought a 2 tb drive.. I know this drive will have to be parity, and I'll only gain 1tb, but that's OK for now.. [this is where I should have read the directions] I put the drive in, the OS sees the drive, I shut down the array, and think that I'm just going to go turn off parity, and set the new drive as parity, then go away for a day while it recalcs the parity, after which, I'd go back and try to re-add the old parity drive as new space... BUT.. After the raid was successfully put offline, I saw a message that said something about Unformatted disk found - click format to format all unformatted disks.. I thought that sounded reasonable - My new drive was certainly not formatted, so I clicked format... THAT is when things went bad.. THREE of the disks said format next to them. It happened so fast, I didn't bother to try to figure out which disks they were, I ust ppulled the power on the Unraid. They said "formatting" for about 3 seconds... As it booted up, I figured that CERTAINLY I had not pulled fast enough, and that all it would take was one sector overwritten to destroy a file allocation table or some such other important construct to render everything erased, but having no choice, I let it come up... It came up, mounted the volume, showed me everything like I'd expect to see it (in the web gui) and mounted all my shares.... strange... So, I looked at my \disk1 share, and saw files, \disk2 and \disk3 also had files, but \disk4 is empty, although according to the web GUI, Disk 4 is quite full... I stopped the parity check from continuing, not knowing if it was going to be making things worse for me or not.. My first priority is to protect some important files, so right now, I'm copying stuff to another computer, but after that's done, what is my best bet?? My instinct is to umount disk4 and run some kind of fsck on it.. Is this good or bad?? Anyone have any other hints?? Thanks!! -Steve
February 5, 201016 yr First of all.. I know I've done what I need to do all in the wrong way now, but for the purposes of this question, please ignore that fact... :-) I'll deal with my upgrade after I'm sure everything is as good as possible... SO.... I've got this UnRaid with five 1 tb drives.. (4+parity of course) They were filling up, so I went and bought a 2 tb drive.. I know this drive will have to be parity, and I'll only gain 1tb, but that's OK for now.. [this is where I should have read the directions] I put the drive in, the OS sees the drive, I shut down the array, and think that I'm just going to go turn off parity, and set the new drive as parity, then go away for a day while it recalcs the parity, after which, I'd go back and try to re-add the old parity drive as new space... BUT.. After the raid was successfully put offline, I saw a message that said something about Unformatted disk found - click format to format all unformatted disks.. I thought that sounded reasonable - My new drive was certainly not formatted, so I clicked format... THAT is when things went bad.. THREE of the disks said format next to them. It happened so fast, I didn't bother to try to figure out which disks they were, I ust ppulled the power on the Unraid. They said "formatting" for about 3 seconds... As it booted up, I figured that CERTAINLY I had not pulled fast enough, and that all it would take was one sector overwritten to destroy a file allocation table or some such other important construct to render everything erased, but having no choice, I let it come up... It came up, mounted the volume, showed me everything like I'd expect to see it (in the web gui) and mounted all my shares.... strange... So, I looked at my \disk1 share, and saw files, \disk2 and \disk3 also had files, but \disk4 is empty, although according to the web GUI, Disk 4 is quite full... I stopped the parity check from continuing, not knowing if it was going to be making things worse for me or not.. My first priority is to protect some important files, so right now, I'm copying stuff to another computer, but after that's done, what is my best bet?? My instinct is to umount disk4 and run some kind of fsck on it.. Is this good or bad?? Anyone have any other hints?? Thanks!! -Steve Parity drives have no file-system, therefore, they are never formatted. Your best bet right now is to get the important data off the server and safe. Then, post a syslog. do NOT write to any drive where you think the format was taking place, not until you know you have the important files. (you do not want to re-use data blocks that might now be un-allocated because you "freed" them) Then, for each of the file-systems, run a reiserfsck on them. Instructions in the wiki. With luck, it was only a issue with the display on the interface and you really did not format the drives. If disk4 is empty, and it was not before you "formatted" it, you can probably get back your files by rebuilding the file-tree. See here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#How_can_I_undelete_files_from_an_unRAID_disk.3F We can give more specific instructions after you post a syslog. Joe L.
February 6, 201016 yr Author Thanks for the help - Here's the Syslog info.. and some screenprints to show what I'm talking about.. The NEW 2TB drive isn't showing up (which I assume is normal, and dont care right now) so all 5 drives are 1tb drives that have been in there for months.. Disk4 is the curious one with all the space shown taken, but no files on the drive. Disk0 is the parity disk.. root@FS1:/var/log# cd /mnt/disk4 root@FS1:/mnt/disk4# ls root@FS1:/mnt/disk4# df -h /mnt/disk4 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md4 932G 932G 9.5M 100% /mnt/disk4 root@FS1:/mnt/disk4# root@FS1:/mnt/disk4# Thanks, and I'll attach the syslog.. -Steve fs1syslog.txt
February 9, 201016 yr Author Just as an update.. Since I'm still using version 4.5-beta6 (I've had trouble upgrading), I see that there are other reasons why my drives may have SAID they were unformatted, and I found that i could reproduce that problem.. It was my directory caching process keeping the RAID from stopping properly... SO.. Since presumably the format process did try to format the drives, my question then was whether or not they really did anything damaging... Since my parity still showed good, and I had no errors on any drives, I decided to get brave after I backed up what I could.. I followed these instructions: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=463.msg3192#msg3192 from the "best of" forum, which is labeled "The correct way to run reiserfsck"... I tried --fix-fixable first, but ended up having to use the --rebuild-tree option, and I ended up with a lost&found directory which explained the missing TB of space... SO.. I have NO IDEA whether my /dev/disk4 was corrupt before I tried to accidentally format the drive, and the format process never started, or if the start of the format actually killed the directory structure, but I've got a TB of files to go through, and copy to the other drives, and then I'll be fine.. This forum has been a great resource, so I'm documenting what I've done in hopes that it could help someone else out. I've learned a lot about UnRaid in the process, which is good for any future troubles I may have... Now.. On to the original problem of adding my new disk... This time, being careful, and following the directions!! -Steve
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