Parity disk not showing up

[y2kindyz]

Ok I have a disk that has a triangle with an ! inside it when i see it on the Dashboard.  On the main screen it has a green dot.  I wanted to change it and si I ordered a new 2TB disk to replace it.  When the Disk came in, I removed the old disk and installed new one, and when I went to reboot, the parity disk does not show up.  Says Faulty on the Dashboard.  I have tried to change the sata cable and change ports, as well as change the power cable and I can't get it to work.

Is there a way to test if the parity disk is bad? I have a HD docking station. Can I try to dock it on my windows computer?

How can i test it?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Oscar

[trurl]

Tools - Diagnostics. Post complete zip

[y2kindyz]

I tried it in my dock and it did show up in my device manager as a healthy partition  I did not format.  i reinstalled and i felt it spool up, but still not showing up in main screen.  I attached diagnostics

 

Thanks for quick reply,

tower-diagnostics-20180123-2146.zip

[trurl]

Your diagnostics show a parity disk and its SMART looks OK except for a few CRC errors, so I'm not sure what you are seeing that makes you say what you are saying. Maybe post screenshots.

[y2kindyz]

Here are the screens of the main and dashboard

[trurl]

If you turn on Help, it will give you more information about the meaning of things on each page.

 

Your dashboard is showing that your parity disk is disabled. It is also showing you have SMART issues with 3 of your data disks.

 

Which disk did you replace exactly? Was it a data disk? If so, did it finish rebuilding?

 

[JorgeB]

Parity disk looks OK, but once it got disable it won't get enable again by itself, you'd need to resync parity, but since disk8 appears to be failing and if you didn't start the array with the parity disk missing you can do a new config and trust parity, then replace disk8.

[y2kindyz]

6 hours ago, trurl said:

If you turn on Help, it will give you more information about the meaning of things on each page.

 

Your dashboard is showing that your parity disk is disabled. It is also showing you have SMART issues with 3 of your data disks.

 

Which disk did you replace exactly? Was it a data disk? If so, did it finish rebuilding?

 

The disk I replaced was disk 5.  Disk 8 &9 do not have any data on them.  They were extra disks I had and just added to the array.  The pic shows the original disk in the array. I removed the new disk when the parity disk showed disabled. I thought the x was that it was not finding it. (Sigh of relief). Before I removed disk 5 parity was run and checked ok with 0 errors. Can I unassigned disks 8 &9 and rebuild from there?   What is the process to enable the parity drive?

 

thank you for your help,

 

Oscar

[JorgeB]

47 minutes ago, y2kindyz said:

Can I unassigned disks 8 &9 and rebuild from there?  

No, parity won't be valid, looking at your first screenshot you did start the array without parity, so it may be no longer valid anyway, also disk8 looks in real bad shape, so a rebuild will likely have corruption, you can still try as long as you didn't make any changes to the array data, this includes starting any VMs/dockers running on the array.

[JorgeB]

Best bet would be to move any data from disk5 to other disk, then do a new config with the new disk5a and without disks 8 and 9 and resync parity.

[pwm]

7 hours ago, y2kindyz said:

Disk 8 &9 do not have any data on them.

 

Remember that the parity logic depends on data disks even if you consider them empty. So you never want to add a questionable disk to the array just to keep as spare storage. As soon as you add it, it is considered just as important as any other disk in the array when it comes to recovery.

 

Any questionable disks you want to keep online for scratch storage should be handled by the UD plugin, so they aren't part of the array.

[y2kindyz]

10 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

Best bet would be to move any data from disk5 to other disk, then do a new config with the new disk5a and without disks 8 and 9 and resync parity.

Ok, great  what is the best way to move data to another disk?  can i drag and drop in explorer?  Or id it more complicated?

 

thanks

[JorgeB]

6 hours ago, y2kindyz said:

can i drag and drop in explorer? 

You can if disk shares are enable but it will use the network, so it will be slower, don't forget to always copy form disk to disk, e.g., \\tower\disk5 to \\tower\disk1

 

It would be faster using for example midnight commander, mc on the console, then copy from /mnt/disk5 to mnt/diskX

[y2kindyz]

ok I have moved all data from disk  to another share.  I am ready to create a new config.  Not sure how to do that so here are the steps i think  i need to do.

 

1  Shut down array

2  remove old disk 5, disk 8 & 9, 

3  install new disk 5

4  restart array

5   un assign disks 5,  8 & 9

6  assign new disk 5

7 Click new config 

8 follow directions for new config (never done a new config )

 

Is that correct?

 

Many thanks in advance

 

Oscar

[y2kindyz]

ok i found how to create a new config.  I reconfigured array.  I assigned all disks as before, not assigning disks 8 & 9 and assigning new disk5.  Do i start array and click box - parity is already valid? or do I start with box unchecked? Will this have an effect on shares config? Or will i need to reconfigure shares?

 

Thanks

 

Edited January 26, 2018 by y2kindyz

[JorgeB]

1 hour ago, y2kindyz said:

or do I start with box unchecked?

^this, a parity sync will begin at array start

[trurl]

Here is a link to an explanation of parity. It isn't very complicated. If you understand parity a lot of how unRAID operates makes much more sense. Including why your parity would not be valid after your particular New Config.

 

https://lime-technology.com/wiki/UnRAID_6/Overview#Parity-Protected_Array

[y2kindyz]

Thank you guys, The new drive was formated and parity is now running.  Is there anyway to speed up the process?  Showing it still has 2 days left.  It is at 20%  It is a 4TB Drive.  Is that normal?

 

 

[trurl]

6 minutes ago, y2kindyz said:

Thank you guys, The new drive was formated and parity is now running.  Is there anyway to speed up the process?  Showing it still has 2 days left.  It is at 20%  It is a 4TB Drive.  Is that normal?

Seems very much slower than normal. Post diagnostics.

[y2kindyz]

 

On 1/26/2018 at 9:08 PM, trurl said:

Seems very much slower than normal. Post diagnostics.

Thanks trurl,

here are the diagnostics.  After everything was back up, i lost one of my shares.  i had moved everything from that share so it was blank.  Is that normal?

 

thanks

tower-diagnostics-20180203-1918.zip

[trurl]

Check filesystem on disk5

[JorgeB]

On 1/27/2018 at 2:58 AM, y2kindyz said:

Showing it still has 2 days left.  It is at 20%  It is a 4TB Drive.  Is that normal?

With the hardware you're using it's normal, you need to replace the PCI controllers with a PCIe HBA to get better performance, also change your onboard controller from IDE to AHCI if available.

 

P.S. you're running a very old unRAID release and should upgrade to latest.