It has been apparent that a warning is needed on the formatting option that can popup when the disk is unmountable was because of file system corruption which is often easily correctable.  This will often happen when a disk has been replaced and rebuilt from parity.  A typical example can be found here in this thread:

 

Format button is disabled by default and user is asked to confirm the format operation. Do you think an additional warning will help the ignorant?

 

24 minutes ago, bonienl said:

Format button is disabled by default and user is asked to confirm the format operation. Do you think an additional warning will help the ignorant?

 

Yes, no, maybe. I think this is all a symptom of the bigger issue of unraid not being aggressive enough in the detection and mounting of existing partitions. It seems fairly easy to stymie the auto detection mounting system, causing a disk to appear unmountable when in reality it's just not detected correctly. Maybe change the mounting logic, and include read only file system test results to attempt to determine possible corruption instead of giving up so easily.

 

If the user was presented with a file system corrupt message instead of just unmountable, maybe more people would take the correct troubleshooting steps instead of blindly formatting and expecting their data to be recreated from parity.

 

I think we techies have failed to some extent, as the number of people who think that parity contains their files is astonishingly high. It's our responsibility to figure out a way to communicate better, not just blame the uneducated user.

Users who aren't familiar with the terminal or xfs_repair don't know where to go next, other than the option that the UI presents them which is format.

 

Perhaps if some type of file system repair option could be reviewed to see if that makes sense. If the system has no bad disks, then isn't the worse that can happen is that it'd just break parity and have to rebuild it? Unclear if this is going to help more or not.

 

As for the format, no extra warning, I think just changing the background of the table cell on the UI to red to denote 'danger' might be worthwhile. After a late night or a few to many drinks, I could of mistook pressing the format button just cause it blends in.

2 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

the number of people who think that parity contains their files is astonishingly high

Anyone that has this idea can't have thought about it very much. A single parity disk that contains all of the (already compressed) media files for dozens of data disks.

5 minutes ago, Lev said:

Perhaps if some type of file system repair option could be reviewed to see if that makes sense. If the system has no bad disks, then isn't the worse that can happen is that it'd just break parity and have to rebuild it?

Parity is maintained during file system repairs on the /dev/md? devices.

Just now, trurl said:

Anyone that has this idea can't have thought about it very much

And yet it seems to be a recurring theme in the general troubleshooting area when someone presses the format button. No, it doesn't make sense to think that way, but when the only option presented when a disk is unmountable is to format it, they make the leap of logic right off the cliff.

5 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

And yet it seems to be a recurring theme in the general troubleshooting area when someone presses the format button. No, it doesn't make sense to think that way, but when the only option presented when a disk is unmountable is to format it, they make the leap of logic right off the cliff.

Yes, I know. There are a lot of misconceptions that come into play in this scenario. unRAID updates parity anytime a data disk is written, and formatting is a write to a data disk.

I agree, need to come up with better ways to make it fool-proof.

 

If the disk becomes unmountable and the GUI presents a format button, then users may think this is the way forward to repair the disk.

 

9 minutes ago, Lev said:

Users who aren't familiar with the terminal or xfs_repair don't know where to go next, other than the option that the UI presents them which is format.

This. ^^^

 

It shouldn't be easier to format the disk than it is to run read only file system checks. The format disk option should be removed from the main array operations page and put next to the file system check on the disk properties screen. That way when someone has an unmountable disk and can't be arsed to look for help before shooting themselves in the foot, at least they will be on the correct page to troubleshoot the issue, and if they do press format after that, we tried.

 

Also, this would partially solve the issue of multiple disks showing unmountable at once, and formatting them all when only one actually needed to be formatted.

Just now, jonathanm said:

This. ^^^

 

It shouldn't be easier to format the disk than it is to run read only file system checks. The format disk option should be removed from the main array operations page and put next to the file system check on the disk properties screen. That way when someone has an unmountable disk and can't be arsed to look for help before shooting themselves in the foot, at least they will be on the correct page to troubleshoot the issue, and if they do press format after that, we tried.

 

Also, this would partially solve the issue of multiple disks showing unmountable at once, and formatting them all when only one actually needed to be formatted.

This sounds like a good approach. It would make you have to format each drive individually when adding more than one, but people expect to have to format a new drive anyway.

Here is an user who has just gotten bit by this issue: