Drive Pull - No Data Found - 5TB Missing


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Just recently I pulled 2 8TB Seagates Compute (SMR) drives :/ to replace them with 2 8TB IronWolf Drives and found problem. Please let me know what I did wrong.

 

My understand was that since UNRAID was not a RAID I would be able to pull any drive (minus parity) and access the data using my USB 3.1 Drive HUB or other enclosure. 

 

Well, I tried this theory and found that the drive which had 5TB out of 8TB used showed up as empty. See screenshot attached. ( DISK 4 & DISK 5 )

 

I have all the data archived so it's not an issue but since I'm rebuilding this array from scratch I want make sure the new setup drive array will be fully readable outside of the server just in case there was a hardware failure.

 

Please advise and thank you in advance for taking the time!

 

hard-drives.JPG

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Just recently I pulled 2 8TB Seagates Compute (SMR) drives  to replace them with 2 8TB IronWolf Drives and found problem. Please let me know what I did wrong.

 

My understand was that since UNRAID was not a RAID I would be able to pull any drive (minus parity) and access the data using my USB 3.1 Drive HUB or other enclosure. 

 

Well, I tried this theory and found that the drive which had 5TB out of 8TB used showed up as empty. See screenshot attached. ( DISK 4 & DISK 5 )

 

I have all the data archived so it's not an issue but since I'm rebuilding this array from scratch I want make sure the new setup drive array will be fully readable outside of the server just in case there was a hardware failure.

 

Please advise and thank you in advance for taking the time!

 

hard-drives.thumb.JPG.2bfc8ea66e93133c32e1b17c6204b7c3.JPG

What is the format of the drive?Is it encrypted?

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56 minutes ago, JCristina said:

My understand was that since UNRAID was not a RAID I would be able to pull any drive (minus parity) and access the data using my USB 3.1 Drive HUB or other enclosure.  

 

Well, I tried this theory and found that the drive which had 5TB out of 8TB used showed up as empty. See screenshot attached. ( DISK 4 & DISK 5 )

They are not readable without extra software in windows. If you had attached them to virtually any linux box, they would show up just fine.

 

This will give you read only access in windows.

https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/linuxfs-windows/#

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10 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

They are not readable without extra software in windows. If you had attached them to virtually any linux box, they would show up just fine.

 

This will give you read only access in windows.

https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/linuxfs-windows/#

I do not think that will work!     At least it did not for me and I raised a bug report with Paragon but so far they have been unable to resolve it.   Although the Paragon drivers could see that it was a XFS format drive and showed me the top level folder corresponding to my User Share it was not able to go any further and show me the actual files.  They offered me a refund so it sounds as if there is no great confidence they will resolve the problem.  A great shame as the Paragon software has worked well for Linux Ext3/4 format disks.

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3 hours ago, itimpi said:

I do not think that will work!     At least it did not for me and I raised a bug report with Paragon but so far they have been unable to resolve it.   Although the Paragon drivers could see that it was a XFS format drive and showed me the top level folder corresponding to my User Share it was not able to go any further and show me the actual files.  They offered me a refund so it sounds as if there is no great confidence they will resolve the problem.  A great shame as the Paragon software has worked well for Linux Ext3/4 format disks.

ouch! I guess then the question would be, if not Paragon then who or what can be used to read in UNRAID drives that are force to be removed due to an emergency?

 

One of the big draws for me was the ability to not require a proprietary system which forces the user to fix the server they have or all their data is rendered usable.

 

Example: If one was working on a project and their server went down, fixing or send away a big box raid array device would be costly but more importantly to time consuming.

 

The idea of the "un" raid was intriguing for this fact. Now ... Well ... :( 

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Haven’t tried it myself, but as already mentioned should be readable by virtually any Linux distribution, so install one in a VM on your windows system and mount the USB disk in the VM, then share it via SMB for access from your windows system.

 

In fact, although Unraid is not officially supported in VMs it does work, so you could probably install a trial version of unRaid in a VM and then using the Unassigned Devices plugin to mount the USB disk and share it.

 

This is definitely all something worth testing prior to any emergency with data you can afford to lose in case you do anything wrong.

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Great suggestion. Could just make a simply 16GB USB thumb drive with lite weight Linux distro and try it. 

 

I know some don't find this important but for me the main reason for unraid was the ability to not get locked into a raid manufacture's hardware for me and the security of knowing that even when sh*t hit's the fan there I could just throw a drive into a hub and pull the data off of it.

 

Can't wait to hear other peoples work arounds...

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When the Paragon software did not work for me I plugged into a Raspberry Pi running Linux and that allowed me to get files off the Unraid drive with no problems.   I did that as part of proving that it was the Paragon software that was at fault when it could not successfully read the same drive plugged into the same USB-SATA dock.

 

i am still hopeful that at some point Paragon will fix their software so I can read such drives from Windows as it would be convenient but I did at least prove that the Linux solution worked.    An alternative I have not tried that would probably work as well is running a Linux VM on the Windows system and passing the Unraid drive to that.    It is what I would probably try if I regularily had to read Unraid drives on a Windows system.

Edited by itimpi
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59 minutes ago, JCristina said:

I will try the plain-jane Linux method of trading the files.  

 

Question: were you set as xfs or btrfs ?

In the case where I was trying to use the Paragon software in Windows I was using XFS.   I have not tried the Paragon software with an Unraid BTRFS disk  - this is something I should check against the Paragon drivers. 

 

I have tried both BTRFS and XFS formatted Unraid drives against Linux running on a Raspberry Pi and they both worked.   I have not tried encrypted drives but forum posts suggest they will  work as well.

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Love to hear you findings. Honestly, itimpi, I'm truly shocked there are not more people interested in the topic of data transport between their UNRAID device and any other device to assure data accessibility.

 

Strange as that's the point of UNRAID vs RAID .. IMHO. 😏

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4 hours ago, JCristina said:

Love to hear you findings. Honestly, itimpi, I'm truly shocked there are not more people interested in the topic of data transport between their UNRAID device and any other device to assure data accessibility.

 

Strange as that's the point of UNRAID vs RAID .. IMHO. 😏

I think this normally only really becomes a big issue when there is a total failure of the Unraid system (e.g. hardware failure) and for this going the Linux route is a tried and tested answer.   In special cases of recovering individual damaged disks then there are solutions such as XFS Explorer that have been used on Windows.

 

In typical normal day-to-day use a drive gets plugged in via the Unassigned Devices plugin for reading/writing files on a 'transfer' disk.

Edited by itimpi
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  • 3 years later...
On 8/6/2019 at 6:33 AM, itimpi said:

In the case where I was trying to use the Paragon software in Windows I was using XFS.   I have not tried the Paragon software with an Unraid BTRFS disk  - this is something I should check against the Paragon drivers. 

 

I have tried both BTRFS and XFS formatted Unraid drives against Linux running on a Raspberry Pi and they both worked.   I have not tried encrypted drives but forum posts suggest they will  work as well.

 

For anyone else looking to mount an XFS drive on Windows I have some updated info in this post:

XFS on Windows

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