Help Needed !! Hard drive replacement issue

[philvidler]

Hi

 

Hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction. I was previously running 6.1.9 when I updated unraid plugin to 6.2.0. Before getting round to restarting my system one of the array drives failed. Upon exchanging my HDD and returning home I discovered an issue with unraid 6.2.0 where it will not the gui will not start with only a cache drive present and as my array was off line I followed instructions on manually updating my installation (downloading latest release, replace bzimage and bzroot files on usb stick) After following this instruction webgui started great !! However now unraid does not remember my configuration and all drives are coming up as unassigned. This wouldnt be an issue was I not in the middle of replacing a drive however now I am unsure on how to precede and keep the data hopefully using the cache to rebuild the faulty drives data as well.

 

Any help would be really appreciated

 

Phil

[itimpi]

You do not mention having a parity drive?  You need an up-to-date parity drive to protect you against failure of an array drive.    The cache drive does not protect against failure of array drives.

[garycase]

Your description is very incomplete.  First, a cache drive has nothing to do with reconstruction of a failed drive.  That requires all of the other data drives and a parity drive with known good parity.

 

First, DO NOTHING with your array until you resolve this.  ANY changes to the array will render reconstruction of your failed drive impossible.

 

Next, describe your EXACT configuration from v6.1.9 => in particular how many data drives did you have and are you CERTAIN your parity drive was good [i.e. did you do a parity check before you upgraded to 6.2?

 

... and how did you determine that you had a failed drive if you didn't start the array ??

 

IF you KNOW your previous configuration [actually all you really need to KNOW for certain is which drive was the parity drive AND that parity was absolutely good], then you can do a New Config that includes the failed drive and check the "parity is already valid" box;  Start the array; and then Stop the array and assign a replacement for the failed drive ... and when you Start the array it will rebuild the failed drive.  But this will only work if parity is good and your drives are assigned correctly.

 

Note that the ORDER of the data drive assignments does NOT matter as long as this was a single parity system -- which clearly it was since you were running 6.1.9.    If/when you convert to dual parity under 6.2 the order DOES matter.

 

[philvidler]

Hi Guys

 

Thanks very much for the quick reply's, sorry for my description its quite late in the evening here!

 

At the start I had 1 parity drive, 1 cache and 4 data drives. Am confident the parity drive was ok did not run a specific test at the time but have had no errors from that drive before. I also remember which drive the parity is and what order they where in.

 

It was the 4th data drive that failed, I got this from webgui before I shut down the system to replace the drive.

 

Like the sound of the new configuration idea and ticking "parity is already valid" was unsure on this before posting after reading:

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Make_unRAID_Trust_the_Parity_Drive,_Avoid_Rebuilding_Parity_Unnecessarily

 

with it stating ..."It should NEVER be used if you have a failed disk or are in the process of replacing a failed disk."

 

Thanks again for your thoughts so far

 

Phil