I was in the process of moving my usb flash drive internally using the motherboard header ports but plugged in the cable the wrong way which fried my usb flash drive.  Tom was nice enough to provide me another key for a different usb flash drive.  I would like to also replace my parity drive with a brand new larger hard drive.  I am running 4.5.6 Pro. 

 

Is it as simple as assigning the parity drive to the new hard drive and re-assign the data drives (I do not know the exact order) on the devices page and then type initconfig from a telnet window or the system console to rebuild the parity drive?

 

Or should I use the old parity drive to rebuild and then when everything is in sync, replace the old parity drive with the new hard drive?

Or should I use the old parity drive to rebuild and then when everything is in sync, replace the old parity drive with the new hard drive?

 

Do this.  It is always safer to do things one step at a time.  This method allows you to recover from the possibility that your brand new parity drive is bad.  To be extra cautious you should also preclear your brand new parity drive before implementing it.

 

As for assigning the drives, as long as you get the parity drive right then the rest don't really matter.  If you assign your data drives out of order, unRAID will figure it out.  However, if you assign a data drive to the parity slot, YOU WILL LOSE DATA.  So be very careful about getting the parity drive correct.  If you really have no clue which drive is your parity drive, you can do this:

 

1) Assign all data drives but don't assign anything to the parity drive slot.

2) Switch back to the 'main' page.  If all the data drives are recognized and the only error is 'missing parity', they you are OK.  If any drives are not recognized or show up as unformatted, then you have most likely made a mistake in your disk assignment.

3) Once you are sure that you have isolated the parity drive, then go back to the 'devices' page and assign the parity drive.  You can now start the array (it should start right away, no parity sync needed).

If the old parity drive was valid and checked out OK then you might as well just go for it. You could fall back to using the old parity drive to rebuild a data disk if you get a failure during the build.

 

If you're not sure about the parity drive then start with it first and do a parity check before you continue.

 

Peter