Migration with a failed MB (?)


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My current setup is Supermicro MB C2SBX with 8 onboard SATA ports + 8 port RAID (8HDs ) and another 8 port RAID(SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SATA / SAS 8-Port Controller Card) with 2 drives.

 

I actually bought an ASUS Prime x370-PRO with Ryzen 1600 about 2 weeks ago and was testing stability before migrating.

 

This weekend all of a sudden my Plex (all I run on this) became inaccessible so while driving by work I stopped by and reset it. I turned the screen on and the keyboard and website were unresponsive. So today I get to work and check the website to see that my array is down and 2 drives are not visible from the last RAID card.

 

Upon booting I get BIOS data error!

When I put the card on the new motherboard it detects both drives and they show up as available to be added. So the slot might be bad in the Supermicro board.

 

I am kind of paranoid just switching the boards, USB sticks and booting with an existing array.

Nothing I have is currently backed up (got 2 8TB external drives coming in today that I was going to use for backup.)

On top of this I do have 2 Parity drives in the system.

 

Should I just swap the setup and see what the PC will bring up without taking the array online?

Individually pull each drive and back it up? (Guess I better get a Linux something to do that since my Win10 wont read XSF system)

If I kick off rebuilding the array would the data from my 2 MIA drives be recovered? This would obviously put more stress on existing drives that are a bit old.

One of my goals is to shrink the number of drives in the system as I have a few 500GB drives and some Seagate 1.5TB ones.

 

Hope all makes sense, lol, to many things going through my head on how to handle this.

 

Thanks!

 

 

2017-05-30 06.52.00.jpg

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Hi -

 

A couple of questions to get things started.

- Can you get into BIOS setup on the old machine?

- Does the old machine boot with the SAS2LP removed?

- Does your motherboard support VT-d, and if so can you turn it off (SAS2LP issues)?

- Do you have any extra sata ports on the old motherboard (i.e. potentially move the two drives from the SAS2LP)?

 

Note - you don't rebuild the array, you rebuild individual drives.  Go slow, don't do anything crazy like rebuilding parity, formatting drives, or anything that could destroy data - this situation is a bit of a mess but right now you are still protected with two drives down but dual parity.  First things first, we need to see if we can get the old machine to boot or if it is necessary to shift efforts to the new machine.

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Old board boots up fine, just the RAID controller quit working in that slot. So I think that PCI-E slot went bad.

Checked Virtualization and VT-d and both were already disabled.

 

I could (will) try to find an PCI 2 port SATA so I can plug that in to boot with those 2 drives.

 

I had the PC completely powered down and when I initially turned it on it seems that the RAID card was booting OK... then I got into BIOS to check settings and once out of BIOS it went back to the BIOS data error! again.

 

Going to leave it unplugged for a bit will try to see if I can fire it up . 

 

I should probably wait for external HDs so I can copy all (if I can bring the array up) and double backup everything in order build new server with all the big HDs and good parts.

 

Thanks for your reply.

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Ok, Few updates.

 

Got the 2 8TB drives in and one of them tested out Ok. (Haven't looked at the other one yet.)

I was able to bootup the server with the 2 RAID card showing.

Unfortunately for me to Start the Array I was forced to check Parity. This will take like 14 hours or so... where I hope that it wont crap out.

 

Ok here is the part where I need some advice now.

The Drive 12 and 13 that are on the dissapearing RAID controller and have absolutely no data on them. I checked by clicking Browse in the console as well as running MC on putty.

Would at this point I stop the Parity check and completely remove these 2 drives?

 

Also is it possible to mount the 8TB USB drive on the server directly to backup data? It is showing up under Unassigned Devices as spun down drive.

 

Thanks!

 

Edited by dimitriz
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38 minutes ago, trurl said:

Removing the drives will invalidate parity.

 

You say parity check but do you really mean parity sync (parity rebuild)?

 

Unassigned Devices plugin is what you need to help with using an Unassigned Device.

 

 

It gives me an option to do Parity Check.

I installed the Unassigned Devices plugin and copying data right now. HUGE Thanks for that tip!

 

Not really going to worry about rebuilding parity (without those 2 drives) or checking it at this point.

Once I backup data and double backing it up elsewhere I will crash the whole server and recreate the array from scratch with less drives and then just copy the data back.

:)

 

 

 

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3 minutes ago, dimitriz said:

Interestingly I keep on running out of space on external drive... the console is showing 8TB drive.

Tried copying picture folder with a bunch of small files and yep it just came up with out of space. lol

 

Ugh just my luck.

Doesn't sound like luck to me, but we need more detailed information about exactly what you are doing.

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Here is the screenshot of the main menu. with the 8TB drive attached.

 

Here is what happens when I try copying from /mnt/user folder to the folder that it shows for drive.

As you can see in MC it shows 97% of the drive is free. (not sure why it only picks up 4TB out of 8 in there.

MainMenu.JPG

2017-06-01 11.43.03.jpg

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Might be Ok... I am copying out via LAN right now. Plugged the 2nd drive to my Win10 PC and also have a 16TB QNAP NAS here I have 80% of stuff backed up from UnRAID server already.

Interesting is that I am probably getting faster throughput on LAN vs. USB2 on the UnRAID server. lol

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