August 27, 20196 yr I am rearranging my unRaid server. I originally had a 1 TB and 2TB HDD as my parity drives and 3 1TB hard drives for my data. I bought 2 4TB HDD and want to add them to the unraid. I precleared both drives and put on in to replace the 1 TB parity drive. I then removed the 2TB drive from the unraid parity and then swapped out one of the 1TB hdd in the data disk with the 4TB hdd. It rebuilt the array (wasn't anything on it as I am just starting to put data on the drives) in about 5-10 minutes. But now I noticed that the Parity drive is saying that it is disabled. I don't want to have 2 parity drives on the array anymore. Can I tell it to disregard the other 2TB drive that was another parity drive? I attached the diagnostics to see if you can make some sense of it. tower-diagnostics-20190827-0014.zip
August 27, 20196 yr Community Expert 6 hours ago, uByte said: It rebuilt the array in about 5-10 minutes. That's not possible, even with no data parity sync need to read all the disks completely, you need to re-enable parity and let it sync: https://wiki.unraid.net/Troubleshooting#Re-enable_the_drive
August 27, 20196 yr Author Okay I am running that now. But is there a way for you to remove the 2nd parity drive from the array? I tried adding it back but it's not big enough now.
August 27, 20196 yr Community Expert 12 minutes ago, uByte said: Okay I am running that now. But is there a way for you to remove the 2nd parity drive from the array? I tried adding it back but it's not big enough now. If you unassign it and start the array to commit the change then Unraid will ‘forget’ it was assigned as a parity drive. All parity drives have to be at least as large as the largest data drive so since you have a 4TB drive in the array any parity drive cannot be less than that.
August 27, 20196 yr Author I see the second I unassigned the drive and started the array back up it forgot about the drive. But it still shows that the Parity Device is disabled. Shouldn't it show that the parity is normal?
August 27, 20196 yr Author Having trouble understanding this. If I have a parity drive and it is functioning shouldn't that parity drive show normal and not disabled? Is this one of those quarks with the software that like everyone knows about but me?
August 27, 20196 yr Community Expert 1 hour ago, uByte said: Having trouble understanding this. If I have a parity drive and it is functioning shouldn't that parity drive show normal and not disabled? Is this one of those quarks with the software that like everyone knows about but me? A drive is disabled because a write to it failed (and thus its contents cannot be trusted). You have to take appropriate recovery action to get it back into a ‘good’ state. If you want to try again with the same drive then: Stop the array unassign the disk. start the array. This makes Unraid ‘forget’ the previous assignment stop the array assign the disk start the array to initiate recovery. steps 2-4 are only required because you are trying to re-use the existing disk. They are not required if replacing the disk with a different one (although they do no harm).
August 27, 20196 yr Author I am running a parity check on it now. If that doesn't work I will give that a try. When I was swapping it out I believe that I had a bad connection on the drive and started to give me a bunch of errors. I stopped the array and then rebooted and it started up fine. But like I said I will do that and report back what I have found. Thank you for the help. I really am liking the community around unraid.
August 27, 20196 yr Author It finished the parity check and found no errors. I just stopped the array and removed the parity drive then I started the array again. Then stopped it and added it back. It is rebuilding the parity .. another 10 hours.
August 27, 20196 yr Community Expert Unraid cannot carry out a parity check if the only parity drive is disabled (as you suggested was the case). I expect that instead it was doing a read-check of all the array drives to make sure they could be read reliably which is what happens if you press the button to start a check with the parity drive disabled. It was only when you carried out the subsequent actions that parity would be rebuilt.
August 27, 20196 yr Author Okay. I am glad that I checked on that. The last thing that I would want is to just ignore it and think it is working. I will keep you posted about the rebuild when complete.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.