Hello everyone, I purchased a 4TB WD Red drive, and installed it into my server. UnRAID detects it but when I start the array it will say " Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout" on that particular drive. The other drives in the system are 2 2TB WD Red's and a 250GB Samsung Evo SSD. I'm using a Dell H200 raid card and I've attached the diagnostics of the server.

pico-diagnostics-20180630-1646.zip

Edited June 30, 20188 yr by .Nexus
Solved

Used drive? Have you pre-cleared the drive?


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No, I purchased the drive new from Amazon.

Have you tried running the pre-clear plugin on this drive before mounting?

 

I am on my phone so can’t look at your diag now.

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The only issue is that I've added the drive to the array. Should I remove the drive from the array so I can run that plugin?

You need to format the drive

Yeah, new drives must formatted. I would unmount and pre-clear the drive outside the array, if it were me.

 

 

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Ah I'm a silly goose, how would I go about removing the drive from the array then formatting it?

Do you have the Unassigned Drives plugin installed?


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You don't remove it, after starting the array there's an option to format any unmoutable disk, next to the stop array button

I seemed to have missed that option, formatted it now and the drive is now available. Thanks for the help guys!

Hello Nexus, sorry for oot question here. I see that you are using Dell H200 controller. Did you need to crossflash the controller or do you run it as it is? Thanks in advanced.

 

Well, I know that new drives should be tested with preclear and then added to the array, however, it is the second time that I find this issue in the same drive and I need to format it in order to add it again to the array. I dont have any information in this drive yet, however I'm curious why this is happening, should this drive be faulty?
 

Should this be due to the fact that I shut down my server on weekends?

 

I also have a VM that accesses an unassigned drive, and I've noticed also that If I restart unraid I need to format again that unassigned drive and add it to the windows OS I have in the VM. This last comment may not belong here, but It may serve as an extra information.

 

Any thoughts are welcome!

 

1 hour ago, rojarrolla said:

however I'm curious why this is happening, should this drive be faulty?

Invalid partition doesn't necessarily mean a drive problem, just that the partition doesn't conform to what Unraid expects, though that should not happen without a reason, diagnostics might give more clues.

I have some warnings, but I don't see anything related to drive problems. Here is a screenshot.

 

 

Please post the diagnostics: Tools -> Diagnostics

On 1/29/2021 at 10:47 AM, rojarrolla said:

format it in order to add it again to the array

No point in adding a formatted disk to the array. You must let Unraid format the disk after adding it to the array.

 

If you add a disk to a new data slot in an array that already has valid parity, Unraid will clear it so parity remains valid. Thus, format before adding is pointless.

 

If instead you use the disk to replace another assigned disk, it will be completely overwritten by rebuild. Thus, format before using as a replacement is pointless.

 

And if you get Unraid to let you use a formatted disk in the array by doing New Config, you have to rebuild parity.

 

Sorry to go sort of off-topic but misunderstanding "format", though common, can cause data loss. Many times we have seen people format an array disk that has data on it just because it is unmountable and needs filesystem repair. You can't recover a formatted disk from parity.

 

Now, back to the show.

 

18 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Please post the diagnostics: Tools -> Diagnostics

 

On 2/5/2021 at 1:58 PM, trurl said:

No point in adding a formatted disk to the array. You must let Unraid format the disk after adding it to the array.

 

If you add a disk to a new data slot in an array that already has valid parity, Unraid will clear it so parity remains valid. Thus, format before adding is pointless.

 

I agree with you, it is pointless to format a drive in order to add it to the array since it will be rebuilt or used as a parity. However this drive was already added. There was not much data on it, but I formatted it again and re-added it to the array and rebuilt a couple of weeks ago. However it happened again. 

 

Here is the screenshot of my main tab:

 

 

And here are my diagnostics file.

 

Thanks!

tower-diagnostics-20210208-0757.zip

That errors means something changed in the partition/MBR and it no longer conforms to what Unraid expects, this should not happen out of the blue, but difficult to guess what caused it, if there was data on disk2 you could likely recover it by rebuilding the disk on top, that would re-create the partition, assuming parity is valid.

1 hour ago, rojarrolla said:

I formatted it again and re-added it to the array and rebuilt a couple of weeks ago

This is very unclear.

 

Do you mean it was already assigned to the array, then you formatted it outside the array, then put it back in the same slot and did New Config and rebuilt parity?

 

Or do you mean it was already assigned to the array, then you formatted it outside the array, then put it back in the same slot and let Unraid rebuild that disk from existing parity?

 

Either way, formatting the disk was completely pointless, so I don't know if you understand the point I was making.

 

Or what exactly do you mean?

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

That errors means something changed in the partition/MBR and it no longer conforms to what Unraid expects, this should not happen out of the blue, but difficult to guess what caused it, if there was data on disk2 you could likely recover it by rebuilding the disk on top, that would re-create the partition, assuming parity is valid.

So, your advice is to rebuild it and rewrite the parity disk? How can I rebuild this disk without touching the parity?

 

33 minutes ago, trurl said:

This is very unclear.

 

Do you mean it was already assigned to the array, then you formatted it outside the array, then put it back in the same slot and did New Config and rebuilt parity?

 

Or do you mean it was already assigned to the array, then you formatted it outside the array, then put it back in the same slot and let Unraid rebuild that disk from existing parity?

 

Either way, formatting the disk was completely pointless, so I don't know if you understand the point I was making.

 

Or what exactly do you mean?

 

I created this array with 2 disks (disk 1 + Parity: sdd sdf ) Then I added disk 2 (sde). After a couple of months running, I got this error, and I formated it and rebuilt the parity disk as it is suggested in the screenshot I sent you, so I did it and it worked fine for a couple of weeks. Now it happened again. That is what I mean. 

I do understand your point: It is useless to format a drive that is going to be overwritten if it will be rebuilt when added to the array. 

 

But anyway, log story short, I have not used this drive (sde) Why am I getting this message? Is what I don't get.

 

Thank you both!

38 minutes ago, rojarrolla said:

I formated it and rebuilt the parity disk

 

So you mean you did this (New Config)?

1 hour ago, trurl said:

it was already assigned to the array, then you formatted it outside the array, then put it back in the same slot and did New Config and rebuilt parity

 

Cause it still sounds like you really meant you rebuilt the data disk, not that you rebuilt parity.

41 minutes ago, rojarrolla said:

So, your advice is to rebuild it and rewrite the parity disk? How can I rebuild this disk without touching the parity?

If there's data there, stop the array, unassign disk2, start array, see if the emulated disk2 mounts and data looks correct, if yes, re-assign the disk to rebuild on top.

On 2/8/2021 at 10:47 AM, trurl said:

 

So you mean you did this (New Config)?

 

Cause it still sounds like you really meant you rebuilt the data disk, not that you rebuilt parity.

I'm sure I formated the drive as it is, then rebuilt parity disk. 

 

On 2/8/2021 at 10:52 AM, JorgeB said:

If there's data there, stop the array, unassign disk2, start array, see if the emulated disk2 mounts and data looks correct, if yes, re-assign the disk to rebuild on top.

OK, Ill try to do that and see what happens. 

4 minutes ago, rojarrolla said:

I'm sure I formated the drive as it is, then rebuilt parity disk. 

How exactly did you get it to rebuild parity? Did you do New Config? Or did you make it think you had replaced parity?

 

Or do you really mean you just did a parity check rather than a parity build?