I'm stuck, and I think I know why, but I don't know my way out of it.

This is what I did:

I built my server, added two fresh drives, formatted them, assigned them, and it all worked fine. I copied about 400GB over to see if it all works.

I then realized I hadn't pre-cleared the hard drives, and so I got a third one (all the same Samsung F3 2TB), and thought I'd pre-clear them all, and start from scratch, with parity protection this time. I ran the pre-clear script, they all cleared fine, and then I swapped the cables for disk 1 and disk 2, just to keep them in the same order they're in on the rack.

 

Of course, it now gives me this error (see attached screenshot):

Stopped. Invalid configuration.Too many wrong and/or missing disks!

Parity got assigned alright it seems, but now it's missing the other two.

I thought I could just format them and start from scratch, but I guess that's not the case. There should be nothing on them save for the pre-clear check, so is there a reasonable way to proceed from here?

I'm not sure I explained my problem properly, but essentially, I'm looking for a way to build a "brand new" array with three fresh,pre-cleared disks, and sort of have unRaid "forget" about the fact that it's worked on two of them before. Would a "Trust My Array" procedure be the right thing to do here? I just don't know...

Also, I'd hate to have to pre-clear them again, but I doubt that would be the case, right?

Thanks in advance for your help!

and then I swapped the cables for disk 1 and disk 2, just to keep them in the same order they're in on the rack.

 

This is why you run into this problem. you can

 

(a) swap cable back to original order

(b) stop array, go to Device page and un-assign ALL data disks then re-assign them back to original order if you still remember.

    At any given time, you should keep a snapshot of the Device page from unRAID GUI for reference.

 

Meanwhile you do pre-clear on a disk BEFORE you put it into unRAID domain.

 

Thanks!

That did the trick. They're assigned now, and I'm about to press "start".

Live and learn 

I'm stuck, and I think I know why, but I don't know my way out of it.

This is what I did:

I built my server, added two fresh drives, formatted them, assigned them, and it all worked fine. I copied about 400GB over to see if it all works.

I then realized I hadn't pre-cleared the hard drives, and so I got a third one (all the same Samsung F3 2TB), and thought I'd pre-clear them all, and start from scratch, with parity protection this time. I ran the pre-clear script, they all cleared fine, and then I swapped the cables for disk 1 and disk 2, just to keep them in the same order they're in on the rack.

 

Of course, it now gives me this error (see attached screenshot):

Stopped. Invalid configuration.Too many wrong and/or missing disks!

Parity got assigned alright it seems, but now it's missing the other two.

I thought I could just format them and start from scratch, but I guess that's not the case. There should be nothing on them save for the pre-clear check, so is there a reasonable way to proceed from here?

I'm not sure I explained my problem properly, but essentially, I'm looking for a way to build a "brand new" array with three fresh,pre-cleared disks, and sort of have unRaid "forget" about the fact that it's worked on two of them before. Would a "Trust My Array" procedure be the right thing to do here? I just don't know...

Also, I'd hate to have to pre-clear them again, but I doubt that would be the case, right?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Once they are formatted, they are no longer "cleared"  sorry.  They will never be accepted as a pre-cleared disk since formatting writes thousands of blocks of data structures to the disks.

 

Nothing (with your broken array) will let you fake out parity and have it still correct.  Basically, you'll need to re-calculate parity.  If you had left the disks where they were, with parity enabled, and the array started, you could have issued  a command like this for each of your data disks to re-format them:

mkreiserfs /dev/md1

mkreiserfs /dev/md2

etc...

 

Right now, best you can do is probably an

initconfig

followed by starting the array

It will want to calculate parity let it.  You can run the mkreiserfs commands even while it is calculating parity, it will be kept in sync.

ok...so what I did was to reconnect the drives to their original ports on the mobo, and it all looked fine. Added the parity drive, and it's still calculating, but I'm already copying stuff over, and it all seems to work fine.

Thanks again for your help, and I hope I did all right this time...