Drive came up "new" after reboot - data lost :-(


Recommended Posts

Okay, I added an 8th data disk to my system a week or two ago. Recently I had some issues on my network where UNC naming ceased working. During the troubleshooting process I rebooted the NAS. when it came up it announced that it had found a "new" disk and asked to add it. Puzzled I said yes figuring that it would see the filesystem and no biggie. Well, it wanted to format the disk and refused to bring up the disk otherwise. I allowed it to format the disk - all data on it lost.

 

As it happens this disk had little on it - a few "videos" but nothing I cannot get back. I'm running the first beta build that had come out a bit ago. Any ideas as to what occured? It's like it hadn't ever seen the disk before. I stopped the array before shutting it down - am puzzled but would like to learn from this to prevent it from occuring in the future :o

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

Ok - I think I may be headed down the same path.  I was adding a new drive, and while I had the case open, I decided to install an additional fan as well.  I am using a rack mount case and pulled the cage with all the hard drives in it in order to add the new drive.  With the drives out, I powered up the case briefly to determine which direction the new fan would spin so I could install it in the correct orientation.  Fan in, new drive installed, all drives in cage dropped back into case,  I powered up the system to find that ALL my disks are marked as "NEW".  In retrospect, I think that what happened is that when I powered up the case with the drives out, it updated the UnRaid configuration as having no disks.  When the disks were re-installed, they were not recognized as belonging to the last known config and were marked new.

 

So... the 900GB question is: how do I get UnRaid to recognize the disks without reformatting?  I don't want to follow BLKMGK's footsteps and accidentally go one step too far.  Tomm?  Help?

-Sky

Link to comment

gryoplane,

 

To save you some grief the next time that you install a fan, most fans are marked with arrows showing the direction of air flow and rotation of the blades.

 

You have to look closely, but they are definitely marked on the frame of the fan.

 

I do it this way all of the time so I do not have to pretest the fan for air flow when first installing it in my server cases.

 

Regards,

TCIII

Link to comment

Gyroplane,

There is an option on the Tools page to initialize the array.  This sets all the drives to "New" and from the documentation "Note: in the special case where all the hard drives are new, the format operation will not clear the data areas; it simply generates parity."

 

I used this successfully migrating to unRAID when I had a setup with 5 data drives and no parity drive.  Once I installed the parity drive, I initialized the array and it simply built parity data from the drives on the system.

Link to comment

Thanks TCIII and musicman.  I looked for an arrow but did not see one - next time I will look harder.  It looks like I may have been a bit premature, and erred on the side of caution after reading BLKMGK's post.  As it turns out there was no problem.  Started the array and the "new" drives were recognized with only the real new drive being marked as unformatted (as it should).  Formatted that drive an am on my merry way with no data lost.

Thanks again,

-Sky

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

Wow, no reply by Tom to a dataloss issue? :o So far I've not had to reboot the system again, I'm also not getting mail notifications of updates to threads :-\ Anyway, I've not put much data on that drive and am hoping this was a one time glitch. I guess the next time the whole system powers down for a cleaning I'll find out if this is a consistant error or not. I'm running the first beta code on my USB stick so it's possible this is a bug in that but so far from what I've read (and why I'm checking in today) the later betas also had issues. If there's one that's solid or even production I'll upgrade and hope this doesn't occur again...

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.