So I went to upgrade my parity drive tonight.

 

Removed the old parity and inserted the new drive. I chose the restore option then noticed my array was coming up as all unformatted....

 

I immediately stopped the sync (after maybe 5 seconds) and shut the array down.

 

I inserted my old parity drive and rebooted. Now it is coming up as initial config.

 

Please tell me all is not lost and what the next step should be.

 

Thanks all.

 

**edit**

 

Sorry, also running 4.5.3

 

-JOHN

Unformatted is misleading. It simply indicates not-yet-mounted.  It is very disconcerting and you might send lime-tech an e-mail asking them to fix the wording.  The disk is formatted, just not mounted, or in the process of replaying journal entries prior to being mounted.  we've seen logs where this can take 5 minutes or more.

 

As long as you did not press the format button you should be fine.  (This is the real danger, since if you press it it will reformat all the disks listed as unformatted.)

 

The "restore" button sets a new initial disk configuration.  It has NOTHING to do with restoring data.  It immediately invalidates parity and will force a full re-calculation when you subsequently "Start" the array.

 

You should be able to stop the array, un-assign the current parity drive, power down, put in the new one, power up, assign the new parity drive and then press "Start" to have unRAID write to the new parity drive.

 

When you re-start, don't be confused by the "unformatted" description.  Just refresh the browser, and in a few minutes all the disks should be mounted.  Just do not press the "Format" button.

 

All your data should be fine.

 

Joe L.

 

 

 

 

Parity is now being written to and array is being read form.

 

Helpful as always Joe.

 

Thank you.

 

-JOHN

Seems like I see a new person posting this same question every couple of days. Does Limetech not read the forums?

I personally haven't had anything like this happen. In fact, unRAID has been great to me. And I have tried real hard to break it too (changed motherboards, swapped sata cables and changed drives to different ports many times, added and taken away drives, pulled power while parity checking *OOPS*) but it just keeps on going. All my times of clicking restore or start I haven't seen an "UNFORMATTED" where it shouldn't say it. Think I'm about confident now to completely trust unRAID with all my most important data.

 

But back to this issue, I wonder why it isn't fixed or changed so it doesn't cause so much confusion?

This and also the RESTORE button. These two things are constantly causing confusion for a lot of people.

Well, Xamindar, just email Limetech and tell them that.

 

Well, Xamindar, just email Limetech and tell them that.

 

Great idea. I just did as you suggested.

The latest 'unformatted' bug seems to be confined to 4.5.3.  Maybe you haven't seen it because you are running a different version, or maybe you are just lucky.  I saw it the very first time I upgraded to 4.5.3.