Hard drive won't format (Solved)

[driekus77]

Hi guys,

My hard drive won't format anymore in unraid.

I unplugged it and connected it to my workstation and I could format it without any problems.

In Gparted the hard drive didn't give any errors.

 

Who can help me?

 

Regards,

 

Dirk 

 

tower-diagnostics-20190721-1233.zip

Edited July 22, 2019 by driekus77

[trurl]

Just to make sure this isn't user error.

 

Did you actually check the box to enable the format button? Not according to that screenshot.

[driekus77]

33 minutes ago, trurl said:

Just to make sure this isn't user error.

 

Did you actually check the box to enable the format button? Not according to that screenshot.

Yes I did it multiple times

 

[flic]

maybe use "Unassigned Devices" and delete the partition

[Titus]

if you have a dock like I do for secure erasing hard drives before sending them out to the ewaste. Try deleting the drives format and useing windows the run check disk or wd check disk tool to verify its not bad drive or lost of bad sectors.

[cobhc]

2 hours ago, flic said:

maybe use "Unassigned Devices" and delete the partition

+1 I had to do this earlier when it just kept returning me to the same menu as if nothing had happened.

[driekus77]

I just resolved the issue 

I removed it from Disk 2

Created disk 4 with the same hard drive and its working again.

Seems like a bug in unraid!

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, driekus77 said:

I just resolved the issue

Do you have another physical drive to rebuild the disk2 slot? Right now you are in a precarious position, as data slot 2 is being emulated by all the other disks. If you were to have a disk failure at the moment, you would lose the data on both the failed drive and whatever data happened to be written to the disk2 slot.

[trurl]

3 hours ago, driekus77 said:

I just resolved the issue 

I removed it from Disk 2

Created disk 4 with the same hard drive and its working again.

Seems like a bug in unraid!

Not so fast. You are definitely not finished with this situation.

1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

Do you have another physical drive to rebuild the disk2 slot? Right now you are in a precarious position, as data slot 2 is being emulated by all the other disks. If you were to have a disk failure at the moment, you would lose the data on both the failed drive and whatever data happened to be written to the disk2 slot.

 

Probably we (or at least, I) shouldn't have even cooperated with their desire to format a disk that was in the array without digging in a little deeper to find out why they even wanted to do that. Possibly they have already lost data.

 

Looks like Unraid cleared the physical disk before adding it to the array as disk4, as it should and as indicated by the very large number of writes to the disk.

 

In the original screenshot, disk2 was unmountable, but in this latest screenshot, the emulated disk appears to have an XFS filesystem, though possibly empty or nearly so.

 

In any case, disk2 does need to be rebuilt, or a New Config with parity rebuild needs to be done.

 

[JorgeB]

4 hours ago, driekus77 said:

Seems like a bug in unraid!

Though it's unusual for a disk to be formatted in that state, it does look like a bug.

[trurl]

9 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Though it's unusual for a disk to be formatted in that state, it does look like a bug.

What "state" exactly are you referring to?

[JorgeB]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

What "state" exactly are you referring to?

Disk disabled but assigned, according to the syslog Unraid formatted the emulated disk successfully, but was still giving an invalid partition error, since the partition layout is created by Unraid it's likely a bug.

[trurl]

1 minute ago, johnnie.black said:

according to the syslog Unraid formatted the emulated disk successfully

So the XFS filesystem on the emulated disk2 likely has no contents.

 

@driekus77

 

Was there supposed to be any data on that disk? Possibly all written data had gone to disk1 up to that point due to allocation method. Do you know if disk2 should have had any data on it?

 

Just in case you don't know, formatting a disk in the array will not allow you to recover any of its data from parity.

 

As already mentioned, your array is not protected currently. Probably there is nothing to be gained by trying to rebuild the missing disk at this point, and instead you just need to rebuild parity without it. I won't elaborate on exactly how to do that until we hear more from you.

[Ziga]

Hi,

 

I had exactly the same problem. Unplugged disk ( to test Unraid ), I plugged it in another PC, formatted it and put it back into Unraid pc - nmountable: Unsupported partition layout. tried it 3 times, now I've mounted to disk 2 and it seems that disk is mounted and started cleaning. 

I dont have any important files on the system yet, I am just checking how it works. 

 

But why didn't disk1 accepted the same HDD as it was in before? just formatted.

 

I have to add I am really new to Unraid and havent been using any NAS/RAID before.

Edited January 20, 2021 by Ziga

[trurl]

This thread you have replied to is more than a year old, and it is unclear whether anything about it really applies to anything about your situation.

 

From your screenshot it looks like disk1 is emulated and mounted, but not installed or at least not assigned. And I think it must be telling us that disk2 is a new disk and being cleared.

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics ZIP file to your NEXT post in this thread.

[Ziga]

24 minutes ago, trurl said:

This thread you have replied to is more than a year old, and it is unclear whether anything about it really applies to anything about your situation.

 

From your screenshot it looks like disk1 is emulated and mounted, but not installed or at least not assigned. And I think it must be telling us that disk2 is a new disk and being cleared.

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics ZIP file to your NEXT post in this thread.

Well, i was searching for my problem and found this thread , so i continued it. Because i believe i have similar problem like OP had.

 

At first I set this disk under disk1 (like it was before i unplugged it), but after format it was said "Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout". unfortuntely i didnt take screenshot. Then I moved it to disk2.

 

this is Diagnostics from my server

 

abazuu-diagnostics-20210120-2252.zip

Edited January 20, 2021 by Ziga

[trurl]

Your diagnostics seem to confirm what I said before:

29 minutes ago, trurl said:

From your screenshot it looks like disk1 is emulated and mounted, but not installed or at least not assigned. And I think it must be telling us that disk2 is a new disk and being cleared.

 

When it is finished clearing disk2 it can be formatted and then it will be an empty disk that you can write new data to.

 

Disk1 is being emulated by parity and when you replace it with another disk it will be rebuilt from parity with the previous contents of disk1.

 

What do you want to do now? Probably best to ask before trying anything else. Everything you did was wrong if you had any real data at stake.

 

[Ziga]

I noticed containers are gone and also Media share with photos is gone. 

 

I want to know what would be the right way to react if this disk failed for real. And also what to do now to rebuild previous state. 

I wanted to simulate disk failure and change it by new disk, but when i inserted new (old formatted ) disk, it was said it's unmountable and I couldnt use it?

 

Edit: if i understood you correctly, after it's been cleaned, i can put it in Disk1 and it will be returned to previous state?

 

 

Edited January 20, 2021 by Ziga

[trurl]

8 minutes ago, Ziga said:

I noticed containers are gone and also Media share with photos is gone. 

Cache pool is mounted, emulated disk1 is mounted, disk2 is new and being cleared. There is some missing information from you if you have any missing files, because all the files on cache and on emulated disk1 should still exist.

[Ziga]

Ok, suddenly Media appeared back and also containers are back working...

 

[trurl]

20 minutes ago, Ziga said:

I wanted to simulate disk failure and change it by new disk, but when i inserted new (old formatted ) disk, it was said it's unmountable and I couldnt use it?

Something missing from what you have told us, or at least not clear from the way you have described it.

 

Disk1, though missing, is being emulated by parity, and that emulated disk1 is mounted. So, all of the disk1 contents are still accessible.

 

If you assign any disk to the disk1 slot, it will be rebuilt with the contents of the emulated disk, and the result should be a mounted disk with all of its former contents.

 

If you assigned the disk you removed and formatted on another system to the disk2 slot instead of to the disk1 slot, then Unraid isn't even going to try to mount it, because it needs to be cleared before it can be added to the array as disk2. And disk1 still would need to be replaced with another disk so it could be rebuilt.

[Ziga]

Ok, thank you for explanation. It seems that I have lost what has been inside Media share. I must have done something wrong and lost it somehow. 
But I still dont know why my disk was unmountable when i insterted it back and even if i formatted it it was saying unmountable. what's the solution to that? to make it mountable back again? 

[trurl]

If you can provide a much more detailed description of what you did maybe we can make some sense of this. What you have said so far isn't making much sense.

 

Did you shutdown your Unraid server when you were removing and/or replacing disks?

[Ziga]

yes, i shutdown server and then I connected the disk. 

[trurl]

Did you shutdown before removing the disk?