OK, I may have messed up in my attempt to shrink my 23 drive array down to 20. I cleared all data from the 3 drives I wanted to remove by moving it to two drives I was retaining that had sufficient space. I then physically removed the three drives and went to Tools and did a New Config with the default of 'retain none'. I had all of my drive assignments so I manually defined those on the Main page moving data drives up in the order to replace those removed. I now have parity and 20 data drives assigned but there is a warning that "All existing data on this device will be OVERWRITTEN when array is Started" !

 

I now realize that I missed the step of unassigning the three drives I was removing after doing a New Config and that I should have  selected the 'retain all' option.

 

So I'm pretty sure I don't want to start my array as it stands based on the warning but I do have the three drives that I removed and all of my data resides on the other 20 drives. Is there any way to get my array restarted, retain my data and rebuild parity?

 

Ver 6.6.6 by the way.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

Looking at my server's Main page, I just realized that the "All existing data on this device will be OVERWRITTEN when array is Started" warning appears to be associated with just my parity drive. I had been spooked that it meant that all data on the whole array would be overwritten. If I start my server as is, with 20 data drives can someone confirm that  parity will be rebuilt based on the data on those drives?

 

TIA

Yes - it is just the parity that gets overwritten as parity is rebuilt based on the remaining data drives.   The data drives will keep their existing data.

Thank you very much itimpi !