Re format parity drive???

[gator4ever]

Had a unclean shutdown of our server. 

(Ceiling came down hitting power cord).

Was able to remove all data from drives and format the data drives.

But did not see a way to format parity drive. 

When a parity is run I have write errors on the drive. 

I have the server empty and would like to run a format on the parity drive.

Is this possible??. 

Trying to avoid removing server and removing drives. 

[JorgeB]

Parity has no file system, so no way to format, it's either in sync or out of sync, if out of sync run a correcting parity check or re-sync parity.

 

7 minutes ago, gator4ever said:

When a parity is run I have write errors on the drive. 

Though depending on what you mean by this it could also be a disk problem, diagnostics would show.

[Squid]

35 minutes ago, gator4ever said:

Ceiling came down...

 

Personally, I would think that this would be your priority here  😁

[gator4ever]

Thanks but it was the drop ceiling. AC guys doing work had a vent break and it collapsed the drop ceiling. 

Looks like I will need to pull the parity drive and place it in a PC so I can format it. Might be a good time for an upgrade 😃

[JorgeB]

6 minutes ago, gator4ever said:

Looks like I will need to pull the parity drive and place it in a PC so I can format it

Why?

[JonathanM]

7 minutes ago, gator4ever said:

Looks like I will need to pull the parity drive and place it in a PC so I can format it.

Why do you want to format it?

[itimpi]

4 minutes ago, gator4ever said:

Thanks but it was the drop ceiling. AC guys doing work had a vent break and it collapsed the drop ceiling. 

Looks like I will need to pull the parity drive and place it in a PC so I can format it. Might be a good time for an upgrade 😃

Why do you think you need to format the parity drive at all?    Doing so will not correct any errors you are getting.   If you do format it and then try to use it again as a parity drive the format will be promptly overwritten with the parity information so you will have gained nothing.

 

the one thing that might be worth doing on the PC is running the manufacturers diagnostic software to check whether the drive is physically damaged and thus needs to be replaced.  

[gator4ever]

#Solved# My thinking was a format would mark any bad sectors as unuseable. 

But replacing the drive seems the best solution. I did not setup this server so I do not know what drives where used. Cheap off the shelf or NAS drives? Could be WD Greens, worst drive ever. 

[JonathanM]

24 minutes ago, gator4ever said:

My thinking was a format would mark any bad sectors as unuseable.

In general that hasn't been true since the days of the floppy disk.

 

A format nowadays only writes a blank table of contents, very few KB are written, and NO surface checking is done. As long as the very small write succeeds, the format is marked as successful. That's why it takes very little time to do.

 

There are several ways to accomplish what you wanted to do, preclear is a very thorough way, but it erases the content. A long smart test would be a good nondestructive, relatively quick way to check all the disks currently in use.

[gator4ever]

Thank you ,I looked at preclear might try that. Not worried about any data. Everything is off server. 

Fairly new to unraid. Most of my experience is on freenas.