Hi all. I noticed this evening that my server was red-balled, and it was my parity drive showing 5 errors. Now, we had a contractor in today who had to shut off the power for about an hour, and this would be longer than my UPS could work, so my server would have had an unexpected shutdown. This might have been while the mover was shifting stuff from the cache drive, but I can't say for sure. I didn't want to do anything too rash, but I stopped my server and basically it reported that the parity drive is not installed, so now it's not being recognised at all. It'll be a few days before I can replace it, but I'm wondering whether there's something I can do in the meantime. Could it have failed purely due to the power outage while being written to? If I can somehow get it recognised, could I, should I try to do a new parity sync and see if it works?

Any suggestions welcome.

I don't think I can do a SMART report or anything while the drive isn't even acknowledged by unRAID, but often a physical reseating of the power and SATA cables has fixed such an issue.

Joe

Hi all. I noticed this evening that my server was red-balled, and it was my parity drive showing 5 errors. Now, we had a contractor in today who had to shut off the power for about an hour, and this would be longer than my UPS could work, so my server would have had an unexpected shutdown. This might have been while the mover was shifting stuff from the cache drive, but I can't say for sure. I didn't want to do anything too rash, but I stopped my server and basically it reported that the parity drive is not installed, so now it's not being recognised at all. It'll be a few days before I can replace it, but I'm wondering whether there's something I can do in the meantime. Could it have failed purely due to the power outage while being written to? If I can somehow get it recognised, could I, should I try to do a new parity sync and see if it works?

Any suggestions welcome.

I don't think I can do a SMART report or anything while the drive isn't even acknowledged by unRAID, but often a physical reseating of the power and SATA cables has fixed such an issue.

Joe

You can try re-seating the connectors, but that alone will not get the drive back online.  If it is "red" it is because a "write" to it failed.  It will need to be re-constructed.  (and since it is the parity drive, basically it is a full parity calculation)

 

You'll need to un-assign it, start the array, then stop the array, re-assign it, and re-start the array. 

Of course, if after re-seating the cables it still does not respond with output if you issue a hdparm command, or a smartctl command then it is time to get a new parity drive.

 

Joe L.

Thanks, Joe. That's exactly what I thought I'd have to do. I figured I'd have to recalculate parity of course, and I'm planning to replace the drive anyway.

Parity sync seems to have gone without a hitch. Back up and running now.