One of my drives on my unraid media server had started Erroring out, so I decided to swap it.  During the swap I had a brain fart and pressed the format button by mistake, and as expected now the data that I thought should be there is gone.  I found a bit later that the errors were due to a bad sata cable, which I fixed.  What I'm wondering now is if there's a way to put back the old "bad" drive that has the correct data, and rebuild parity to recover the "lost" data?   Or is there another way to recover the data from the old drive and populate it to the new one?   I'm trying to avoid having to re-rip all my blu-rays again!

 

thanks for the help!

 

 

You can do a new config, keep all assignments except reassign the old disk, then start array to begin parity sync.

Or, mount the drive using the unassigned devices plugin, and manually copy the data to the new drive or whatever destination you want.

 

Or, you can connect the drive to almost any computer running linux, and read the files that way.

 

Many different methods, as long as the old drive is intact.

Yeah the drive is intact.  I may have to try the unassigned devices plugin since I don't have a linux machine to read the files.  And I'm worried I may screw up a new config and lose the data for good. 

 

I really don't want to keep the old drive, since it's old and only 2TB, but I need to get that data over to the new drive.  

 

Sorry but I haven't used that plugin before, so I'm not sure how to move the data over using this app.  Is there a guide/tutorial somewhere on how to do this?  I tried searching on the web, but didn't find what I was looking for exactly.  Do you have to do a parity sync after copying?

The UD plugin by itself doesn't copy the data, it just allows you to access it at whatever linux path you tell it.

 

It's up to you to copy the data, there are MANY ways to get that done.

 

You can tell UD to share the drive over the network, and copy the data using windows explorer.

 

You can use any of a few file manager dockers, Krusader and Dolphin are the top contenders.

 

You can use Midnight Commander (mc), rsync or cp at the command line.

 

Pick a method and google around, if you have questions about something feel free to ask, after you research the options.

 

33 minutes ago, kswitchgator said:

Do you have to do a parity sync after copying?

No. A properly working unraid system keeps parity in sync through all file operations.

 

Besides, parity doesn't have any files anyway, all it knows how to do is recreate a whole drive intact, file system format and all.

I couldn't get the drive to mount using the plugin, when I looked at the log there were IO errors during the attempted mount.  However, I was able to get the old drive hooked up to my windows PC and made it readable using Paragon's "Linux File Systems for Windows" SW.  So I'm now working on transferring the files back to the server that way.  So far so good...

 

I'm starting to wonder if the MB in my server is on it's way out, since the drive had no issues being recognized and read on my windows desktop, but had IO errors in the unraid server.  

31 minutes ago, kswitchgator said:

I'm starting to wonder if the MB in my server is on it's way out, since the drive had no issues being recognized and read on my windows desktop, but had IO errors in the unraid server.  

A dodgy SATA cable would be more likely.

I thought that at first as well, so I tried a brand new cable and it still did the same thing.  This machine has been running 24/7 for multiple years so I wouldn't be shocked if it's dying.  It's an old ASUS P8P67 LE board with an intel core i3-2100T, but it works fine for my main use (mainly a plex server and to backup for other PCs).   Also, while moving data back onto the Cache drive from the old disk, another drive threw up 2 read errors while it wasn't even being used.  So not sure what the deal is there.  It's been a solid system really, up until this week of course, lol.  

 

You might also be suspicious of the Power Supply.  They have been known to trigger many different kinds of unrelated problems...