First things first, I'm a newbie to UnRaid.  I bought the license because I want to use it long term.  Part of the learning process is rebuilding from scratch.  So, I'm rebuilding for the first time right now, and UnRaid wants to rebuild my system from the parity drive.  While this is an awesome thing, it is not what I want right now.  I want to start fresh, with a clean UnRaid server.  I've moved drives around, changed the parity drive to one that wasn't, added cache drives, and gawd bless UnRaid, it still wants to rebuild, saying that it will take about 100 days.  If my data was that critical, I would be very thankful.  I just want to burn it all down and start over.  Any tips on how to do this?

You canuseTools->New Config to reset the array, make any drive assignments you want and then start the array.    If you have a parity drive assigned then Unraid will build parity based on the current assignments.

 

This will not actually erase any data on the drives, but it will allow you to specify the current drive set that Unraid is using.   If you want to erase the data on a drive you need to do the following:

• stop the array
• click on any drive you want to erase the data on and change its file system type
• start the array.    
• The drive(s) will now show as unmountable and there is a check box to allow you to format unmountable drives (and gives you their serial numbers so you can check they are the ones expected).    Click the check box and tell the system to format the drive(s).     This should only take a few minutes.
• stop the array
• Click on a drive and change the file system to the one you want to end up with.
• start the array and repeat the format step

At this point your disk(s) will show that they are basically empty.    There will be a small amount of space showing as used but that is the overhead of creating the empty file system on the drive.

Wow.  Thank you very much for the detailed instructions.  I will follow them and start anew.  Thanks again

6 hours ago, TexasGrill said:

it still wants to rebuild, saying that it will take about 100 days

There is no reason it should ever take that long to rebuild even the huge disks we have today. Possibly that number would have quickly settled out to a much smaller amount of time. When you start over and rebuild parity, if it looks like it is going to take more than 3 hours per TB of parity size then you need to come back to us to help find the problem.

 

I recommend installing cache BEFORE enabling dockers and VMs. That way things that belong on cache get created there. It can be a bit of trouble getting those moved after enabling them.

Looks like it was just an early estimate of how long it would take.  It is now 10 hours later and UnRaid is estimating that it will be finished in another hour and a half.