August 7, 20178 yr I had a 2TB USB3 drive attached to slot 2 which had gone offline a couple of times and unraid finally marked it as disabled. So I went and bought a 4TB SATA drive to replace it. I followed the procedure on the wiki here: Replacing a Data Drive except I did not preclear the new drive. The wiki indicated that this was the procedure to use if you want to upgrade a drive to a larger one, or replace a bad drive. It seemed like it was rebuilding the drive. There were many writes to the new drive. However once the process finished, the new drive remained "unmountable" and unformatted, but the array was green and parity was valid... So if my old drive was actually bad, I would have lost data. I had to format the new drive, which of course left it empty. I am currently copying the original data into it from the command line. So my question is: Is the wiki incorrect for upgrading to a larger drive, and what is the procedure that others use? unRAID 6.3.5 by the way.
August 7, 20178 yr Community Expert You made a mistake in formatting the drive (which wiped the data). The chances are the reason it was unmountable was because of file system corruption (due to a failed write) which could have easily been repaired. What you should have done instead was stopped the array; restarted it in Maintenance mode; clicked on the problem drive and selected to run the file system check/repair. When tha repair completed stopping the array and restarting in normal mode would almost certainly resulted in the drive mounting without further issue and with all its data intact.
August 8, 20178 yr Author Oh so the original file system on the disabled drive could have been bad, and that was transferred to the new drive? Or is it because it was a different size? Yeah a file system repair makes sense.
August 8, 20178 yr Community Expert 5 hours ago, CaffeinatedTech said: Oh so the original file system on the disabled drive could have been bad, and that was transferred to the new drive? Or is it because it was a different size? Yeah a file system repair makes sense. Rebuilding a drive does not fix any file system corruption issues so if you had corruption before the rebuild you will still have it afterwards. In other words if it is showing as ‘unmountable’ before the rebuild it will still show that afterwards. i am hoping that at some point the Format option could be enhanced to warn you that there appears to be a file system on the disk that could possibly be recovered and that will be wiped if the format proceeds. This would help avoid users issuing the format without realising the consequences.
August 8, 20178 yr Community Expert Done-- (At least, it has been requested...) Edited August 8, 20178 yr by Frank1940
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