Ok, so

I built my system last night with two WD20EARS. I however awesomely forgot to put the jumpers on the drives. I started the array, formatted the drive, and loaded one or two files onto the drive. I was than having trouble copying large files onto the drive and thats when I realized that I hadn't put on the jumpers. So I shutdown my system and put on the jumpers. But when I booted up again, the array refused to start.

 

Whenever I click start it says it's Mounting the drive, but if I click refresh it goes back to the normal screen and says the array is stopped.

 

Did I do something wrong here? Shouldn't I be able to just start it back up and reformat the drive?

I'm really lost here, and I tried running the preclear script, but it told me my drive was mounted and in use, even though I took it off the array through the web interface.

 

Please help. Thanks, in advance.

Simple answer:

unRAID will not recognize the drives once the jumpers have been put on if they were initialized by unRAID without being jumpered.

 

Your best bet (if you don't have much data on them) would be to leave the jumpers on and reformat them using unRAID (don't forget to backup your data). This will properly align the partition and is in fact your best bet going forward.

 

How do I get unraid to format them when I can't start the array? There is not format button on the web interface. Can I do this from the console?

I'm really lost here, and I tried running the preclear script, but it told me my drive was mounted and in use, even though I took it off the array through the web interface.

 

I assume you unassigned the drive.  Did you Log in via telnet or on the system console as root and run initconfig?

 

Of course you lose whatever was on the drive but should be able to run peclear on it now.

How do I get unraid to format them when I can't start the array? There is not format button on the web interface. Can I do this from the console?

 

If you know the unix device for the drive it is easy to wipe the existing partition table from the command line.

 

It is critical you know the correct disk device.  Doing the following on the wrong device will erase its partition table making it appear as un-formatted.

 

You can confirm by typing:

hdparm -i /dev/sdb

It will print out the model and serial number of the affiliated disk.

 

If the device is /dev/sdb, use the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=1 bs=512

Use the correct device accordingly.

 

To unRAID the disk will then appear as completely unformatted and un-partitioned.