Hi all,

 

I made a mistake and am trying to fix it, but am not sure which step to try next.

 

Here's the situation:

 

I have this configuration:

Currently:

PATA Motherboard

2 PATA cards

drive 1 SATA w/Pata-Sata converter (Parity drive)

drive 2 SATA w/Pata-Sata converter

drive 3 SATA w/Pata-Sata converter

drive 4 SATA w/Pata-Sata converter

drive 5 PATA drive

drive 6 PATA drive

drive 7 PATA drive

drive 8 PATA drive

drive 9 PATA drive

drive 10 PATA drive

drive 11 PATA drive

 

My system froze, so I rebooted and I started seeing errors  on drive 9(250GB pata). Nothing changed on any of the drives so I shut it down to replace that disk. I put in a 500GB (SATA w/pata converter) since I only have pata pci cards in the server. When it started up, it showed the new drive as new so I choose the option that says to resore data and expand. While this was happening, something must have happened since I started seeing more errors on the new drive 9 so I thought it might be the pata/sata converter. There was no status besides the word "started" I think?? Since it wasn't giving me any status, I hit reload on the browser and nothing came back up. I wasn't sure if it rebuilt the drive, expanded, or what. I thought then that maybe I should simply find another 250GB Pata drive and stick with pata until I can migrate over to a new system. I did that and then when it came up, it gave me the blue(new disk), but complained that it was too small.....Is there a way to force it back to the small drive then rebuild? I thought that this would work since nothing was written to any of the other drives, nor the parity drive so I should be able to rebuild on another drive 9.

 

Since I couldn't figure it out, I thought I would try this....With the new 250GB pata drive installed(exact model as the original I pulled out earlier), I clicked restore to tell the unraid system that I wanted to use this drive. When I did that, it worked, but then hung up. I rebooted the server and it immediately started to rebuild the parity WHICH I DIDN"T WANT since the new drive was blank(drive 9).

 

I then thought that my parity was wrong and my drive wasn't rebuilt successfully yet. The only way I knew to fix this was to put the original drive 9(with data) back and rebuild the parity. This would hopefully get the parity back to normal, if drive 9 lasted that long. Then, I could put the new blank drive 9 back in and restore to that one......I'm in the progress of doing this which is running at a slow 888KB/s and will take about 287 hours.

 

After all this I thought I should just have mounted the bad drive to another machine, backed up the data, and copied it back to the new drive 9...then rebuilt the parity.

 

Is there a way to force Unraid to do what you want, even though it tells you otherwise? For example. I swapped to a larger drive and started to rebuild the data. I hade problems so I wanted to switch back to different drive which was small and rebuild to that one. This should be fine since I didn't change any parity data, but the problem is that it already registered the new larger drive so I couldn't switch back to the smaller one. I simply wanted to force Unraid to accept the smaller drive and then rebuild the data on it. Should this be possible since I didn't write to any other drives, nor the parity drive?

 

Sorry for the long story, but I'm hoping someone understands what happened and could give me better advice for this type of situation.

 

Thanks!

 

the disk configuration is stored in the config folder in the flash drive.

 

If you had made a copy of it for safe-keeping you could have reverted back to the same "disks" by copying it back and rebooting.  It would  not fix the damage you did to your  parity drive you caused by pressing the button labeled as "restore"

 

It sets a new disk configuration based on the currently assigned and working disks.  It immediately invalidated your parity calculation, forcing a new calc when you then pressed "Start"  The button labeled as "Restore" has nothing to do with restoring data.

 

Two sections of the wiki will be of interest to you:

The "Trust my Parity" procedure http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Make_unRAID_Trust_the_Parity_Drive,_Avoid_Rebuilding_Parity_Unnecessarily

and

Evils of the Restore button. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Best_of_the_Forums

 

When you pressed the button labeled as "restore" it renamed your copy of your config/super.dat file to super.old and then created a new super.dat file based on the then present (and assigned) drives.

 

If you were to rename the old super.old file to super.dat the unRAID array would then think the drive sizes wee what they were before you pressed "restore"  (The parity would be wrong, since you overwrote it, but you could put the old disk back into place.

 

On the other hand, if you have a spare port on the PC you can mount the old smaller drive outside of the unRAID array and get to its contents. 

 

Joe L.

 

 

Thanks for th info!! It was very helpful.

 

Joe...I do have a question for you regardnig the "The 'Trust My Array' Procedure".

 

Is the procedure near the bottom doing something different than actualy rebuilding the parity drive. The top paragraph says to avoid completely reubuilding the parity drive, but I thought that was it's "default" task. Is the bottom procedure just "checking" to see if the parity drive is current and updating sectors that are not?  I'm trying to understand this concept. I thought that everytime a disk was written to or changed, the parity drive is updated, therfore in sync with the data.

 

Is this article saying that when you "restore", or force a new setup, Unraid will invalidate the parity drive and immediately start rebuilding.....Which in my case above, was not needed since I put back the original drive and everything should have been fine. If I would have followed the procedure in the article, I could have just "checked" that the parity drive was still acurate instead of having it rebuild the entire drive.

 

Am I understanding this correctly?

 

Thanks!

Hi Joe...another quick question regrading the restore button. If you put in a new drive and hit "restore" to update the configuration, does this new drive automatically get reformated and wiped out? Then the parity drive startes updating? Or does it just accept the new configuration and start updating Parity? I'm wondering, because I can't remember if it detects a new drive and asks to reformat or what. My system has been pretty stable for the last couple of years until just about a week ago. Now that I have this issue, I'm trying to remember all the things I did a long time ago.