Over the past month or two I had a drive that was giving me fits. It recently had gotten to the point where it kept dropping offline and the contents would be emulated. I could hear a loud "click" coming from the server too so I knew it was on it's last legs. I decided to remove the drive and upgrade it to a 8tb. (It was previously a 3tb) I powered the array down and removed the drive and replaced it with the 8tb. I started up the array and ran the data sync/parity rebuild. After about 16 hours the array was ready to go. Much to my surprise there was no data on the replacement drive after the rebuild (disc 6)? This has got me pretty worried that none of the data on the bad drive was replaced to the new drive on the rebuilt array.

 

Would it matter if the disc contents were "emulated" when I powered down the array for the last time with the bad drive? Where do I go from here?  Is there a way I can attempt to extract the data from my old drive onto the new array?

Could you see the data on the ‘emulated’ drive before you did the replacent?   If so it should be present on the rebuilt disk.

 

A possibility is that you had file system corruption.   If so that would not be fixed by a rebuild.   The symptom is that the Drives shows up as unmountable in the GUI. To fix that you would need to put the array into maintenance mode and run a file system check (from the dialog available by clicking on the drive on the Main tab).

 

The commonest way for data to go missing is when users mistakenly try to do a ‘format’ as part of the drive recovery process.    Doing a format effectively wipes the data as it writes an empty file system to the drive and updates parity to reflect this).

 

if the old drive has not physically failed you should be able to mount it using the ‘Unassigned Devices’ plugin and then copy data off it to the main array.

Edited December 17, 20178 yr by itimpi

No clue where the data went. I am pretty confident that I did not format anything other than the data rebuild.

 

 

26 minutes ago, itimpi said:

if the old drive has not physically failed you should be able to mount it using the ‘Unassigned Devices’ plugin and then copy data off it to the main array.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I am copying from the unassigned devices plugin now. I wonder if the disc was truly going bad. I'll run it on WD extended test to see after I get the data off of it.

2 hours ago, SuperNotSupper said:

I did not format anything other than the data rebuild.

Formatting is NOT part of the data rebuild.

2 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Formatting is NOT part of the data rebuild.

 

Right, my verbiage was a little strange but what I was really saying was I do not believe I did anything other than run the "data rebuild/parity sync".

If you haven't reboot since the rebuild post your diagnostics.