Hello,  I've posted previously about a drive showing up as unformatted, and I couldn't figure out what was happening.

 

I finally gave up, hooked up the drive to a linux box, copied all the contents and then tried to run reiserfsck commands to see if I could recover the drive.  They didn't work, so I'm at the point where I just want to reformat the drive, and copy the contents over (my parity drive was corrupt).

 

From the web gui, I chose format all unformatted drives, the gui says it has started, but when I refresh, nothing has happened, and the unformatted drive still shows as unformatted.

 

Can anyone shed some light?

 

Thanks

syslog.txt

Hello,  I've posted previously about a drive showing up as unformatted, and I couldn't figure out what was happening.

 

I finally gave up, hooked up the drive to a linux box, copied all the contents and then tried to run reiserfsck commands to see if I could recover the drive.  They didn't work, so I'm at the point where I just want to reformat the drive, and copy the contents over (my parity drive was corrupt).

 

From the web gui, I chose format all unformatted drives, the gui says it has started, but when I refresh, nothing has happened, and the unformatted drive still shows as unformatted.

 

Can anyone shed some light?

 

Thanks

Have you run a smart report on that disk?

 

In your syslog I can see where unRAID attempted to create a file system on the disk.  There were a bunch of I/O errors:

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA emhttp: shcmd (19): mkreiserfs -q /dev/md4 >/dev/null 2>&1

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 0

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 1

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 2

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 3

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 4

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 5

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 6

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 7

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 8

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA kernel: Buffer I/O error on device md4, logical block 9

May 27 21:31:43 DIRECTO_MEDIA emhttp: shcmd: shcmd (19): exit status: -122

 

I'd get a smart report. It may be that the drive is failing.

smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sdk

 

Joe L

here's the Smart report.  I also did badblocks on the drive, and there were no bad sectors.

 

smartctl.txt

here's the Smart report.  I also did badblocks on the drive, and there were no bad sectors.

 

 

I can't explain why the mkreiserfs command is failing...

what do you see if you try the same command

mkreiserfs -q /dev/md4

from the command line?

Output below.

 

Just to reiterate, I did badblocks, and it found no errors (this was on another linux machine).

 

 

root@DIRECTO_MEDIA:~# mkreiserfs -q /dev/md4

mkreiserfs 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)

 

A pair of credits:

Lycos Europe  (www.lycos-europe.com)  had  a  support  contract  with  us  that

consistently came in just when we would otherwise have missed payroll, and that

they kept doubling every year. Much thanks to them.

 

Vladimir Demidov wrote the parser for sys_reiser4(), the V3 alpha port, part of

the V3  journal  relocation code,  and helped  Hans keep  the business  side of

things running.

 

 

 

The problem has occurred looks like a hardware problem. If you have

bad blocks, we advise you to get a new hard drive, because once you

get one bad block  that the disk  drive internals  cannot hide from

your sight,the chances of getting more are generally said to become

much higher  (precise statistics are unknown to us), and  this disk

drive is probably not expensive enough  for you to you to risk your

time and  data on it.  If you don't want to follow that follow that

advice then  if you have just a few bad blocks,  try writing to the

bad blocks  and see if the drive remaps  the bad blocks (that means

it takes a block  it has  in reserve  and allocates  it for use for

of that block number).  If it cannot remap the block,  use badblock

option (-B) with  reiserfs utils to handle this block correctly.

 

bread: Cannot read the block (0): (Input/output error).

 

Aborted

root@DIRECTO_MEDIA:~#

 

want to hear something strange?

 

In a fit of frustration, I took the drive out - stuck it on a Windows machine, and deleted the partition with the admin tools.

 

Popped it back into my unRaid, tried formatting - same weird thing where it would say starting, but then just come back as an unformatted drive.

 

Stopped the array, remove the device on the config page, restarted the array, stopped it again, readded the drive (hoping I could just format it), and voila, it recognized the drive again (data intact!)....array started parity check (it was obviously not working)..

 

is that the definition of strange?

want to hear something strange?

 

In a fit of frustration, I took the drive out - stuck it on a Windows machine, and deleted the partition with the admin tools.

 

Popped it back into my unRaid, tried formatting - same weird thing where it would say starting, but then just come back as an unformatted drive.

 

Stopped the array, remove the device on the config page, restarted the array, stopped it again, readded the drive (hoping I could just format it), and voila, it recognized the drive again (data intact!)....array started parity check (it was obviously not working)..

 

is that the definition of strange?

No, actually, it sounds a lot like an intermittent cable connection.

Same thing has happened, although it happened after I rebooted from this problem:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6741.0

 

My disk 4 comes up as unformatted.

 

Since the last time it happened, I switched SATA cables on the suspect drives.

 

Can anyone decipher what the syslog is telling me?

 

20100619-2226-unraid_syslog.txt

It is telling you it could not mount disk4 because it could not detect a superblock in the disk.  You probably need to follow the procedure as described in the wiki to check the reiserfs file-system on that disk.

 

The initial

reiserfsck --check /dev/md4

will tell you what to do next.

 

Be aware that if you do need to use the --rebuild-sb option you will be asked a series of prompts and the correct answers are NOT the default responses.  See the thread pointed to by the wiki for the correct responses.

 

Joe L.