I just built a new unRAID server using a Gigabyte 945GZM-S2 board with ten 500 GB SATA drives (2 promise controllers).

 

Yesterday I got my license key and set up the drives on the devices page.  It started building the parity drive, and (perhaps foolishly), I clicked the format button while that was going.  After that, it just said formatting whenever I refreshed the screen and didn't give an update on how the parity build was going.  This morning, the read/write statistics had stopped getting bigger so it should have been done.  I pressed the "stop" button to shutdown the array and I was going to reboot.  The stop command never returned.  I logged on as root on the console and tried the "shutdown -r now" command and it broadcast that it was rebooting now, but it never did.  Of course as luck would have it, the forums have been down all morning (much to my frustration) so I didn't have any other ideas and I hit the reset switch.

 

When it came back up, it started a parity check.  I told it to stop the parity check and it did.  It showed all green for all the drives.  I pressed the stop button to shut down the array, and again - it did not respond and I had to reset.  Since then I've tried about everything I can think of including taking out the flash drive, reformatting it and starting from scratch.  I tried to initialize the array without a parity drive so that it wouldn't try to start building the parity drive.  Again, I can bring the array online, but not offline.

 

I've tried issuing the "stop command" at the root command prompt and that doesn't work.  I'm really at my wit's end here.  I'm attaching my syslog and would greatly appreciate if anyone could offer any advice.  I'm wondering if somehow the formatting of the drives screwed up, but I'm not sure how to reformat since the format button on the main webpage has gone away since it thinks the drives are formatted.

 

Thanks

I tried umount /mnt/disk1 - disk9.  It worked for disk1 - disk8, but for disk9, it says "device is busy".  When I looked at the webpage after unmounting the disks, it showed disk1 - disk8 being unformatted, so I hit the format button.

 

I came back after an hour and the read/write stats on the drives had stopped changing, so I assume the formatting was done, but the status still said formatting and thus would not give me the reboot button (similar to what I had this morning after letting it run overnight).  Is it possible formatting would take over an hour and it just wasn't done?  I doubt it, but how long does it take you all.

 

After reset, I had to hit start to initialize the array.  I tried to hit stop, and again the webpage never comes back and cannot be refreshed.  I'm getting ready to run stop on the root prompt, but I doubt that will do anything.

 

Is it normal for one of the disks to not respond to umount (maybe a system drive or something)?  Or could disk9 be the root of my problem?

Everything in the log looks fine to about line 397, then there are some ReiserFS transaction replays, then you have a kernel bug reported in line 433 of 497, during a remount of the ReiserFS.  The log continues on though, as if there's no problem, yet to this untrained eye, it appears the Reiser subsystem may be in big trouble.  I suspect that the file system may be corrupted badly on 1 or more drives.

 

I'm in no way an expert, so you should probably wait for better advice, but if it were my system, I would start over, by deleting /config/super.dat from the flash drive, and editing /config/disk.cfg to remove the parity and disk lines.  I would also start with assigning only one drive, to disk1, and testing that everything works correctly, including access to and read/write from other stations.  Then assign the rest, including parity, let them all clear, then all format.  Whether or not the parity drive is assigned is your choice, should not affect operations one way or the other, as far as I know.

 

I know you have started over once, and it did not work. It's possible you may have to clear the partition table on each drive.  You can do that with a bootable DOS floppy or CD containing Fdisk or your favorite partitioning utility.  I use BootItNG for managing things like this, powerful and flexible, but it's not free.  Of course it means temporarily adding a floppy or CD drive to the system.

 

I'm not sure that the console commands 'stop' and 'shutdown' are fully supported with unRAID.  I would stick with the Web interface, use the Stop, Reboot, and Powerdown buttons. There is also a good scripted tool called 'Unmenu' created by a very helpful unRAID user, which automates the Stop and shutdown, from the console.  Thread is here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=153.0

 

More expert advice is needed, but I just wanted to give you a few quick thoughts.

 

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Just saw you had posted again, so what I've said above may or may not be helpful.  It does sound like a corrupted file system on disk9.

 

Formatting only takes a couple of minutes.

 

Thanks for the advice Rob.  I'm taking your advice, I deleted super.dat and deleted the disk lines out of the config.  I'm not assigning one drive at a time to the array, starting it, using umount /mnt/disk1 to unmount it, then when I refresh, it shows the drive is unformatted, so I click format and format it.  So far that worked for the first drive and I was able to stop the array.  I'll go through each of the drives and do that and see if I encounter problems with an individual drive before I start assigning multiple drives to the array.  I'll update when I'm further along.

That seems to take care of things.  I got to the final drive and that was the one that would not let me umount it (said it was busy), so I couldn't reformat it through the GUI.  Instead I pulled it out of the Icy Dock and plugged it into my Windows machine and formatted it NTFS.  When I put it back into the array, it said it was unformatted, so I formatted it and all seems well!

 

I've got several TB's of movies on Terastations to move over to the array, so I'm going to do it without the parity drive installed.  Once the movies are over, I will activate the parity drive and hope to be up and running.

 

Thanks again for the advice and checking out my syslog.

 

In the future, Tom might want to disable the format button while the parity drive is being built as that seems to be what went wrong with me, trying to do both at once.  Could be a fluke I guess.

Great!  Sounds like a good plan.  I think you're right about the Format button.