Disk missing in array, but not in real life


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Hello everybody,

 

can please somebody look into this and tell me where is the problem? 

 

Issue description:

Had been experiencing intermittent problems for a while, when UNRAID started and showed several missing disks. After restart this cleared and was OK again. Then at one point of the time it started to do this error consistently after each start. Did some shuffling of SATA ports and changing of cables and the situation is now that I have missing disk problem with only one disk and always the same disk.

Did basic troubleshooting and it looks rather strange to my inexperienced eyes. Looks like there are no errors in syslog regarding this particular disk, but after start it is always posted as missing in array. Doing SMART test both quick and detailed shows no errors. When I took the disk out of the unraid box and plug it into another linux machine, I can mount it read only and read random contents on it successfully. However, xfs_repair /dev/sdc1 shows "bad primary superblock - bad or unsupported version !!!" and then looks forever for secondary one.
Strange for me is that as I understand it as long as the disk itself is accessible even with filesystem corruption I should be able to reinitialize the disk back into the array using a parity disk. However, UNRAID shows it simply as if the disk wouldn't exist at all, which it obviously does and is even at least to an extent readable.
I would like to know if the problem is with the disk itself, if it is just a corrupted filesystem problem that I should "fix" by deleting partition and reinitializing the disk or if the problem is caused by used motherboard on UNRAID, which is also possible as the board is very old one and might have ran into its own old age issues.
Attaching last diagnostics from the server. Also did upgrade to the last version of UNRAID (after this diagnostic run so not reflected in the diagnostics file), but no change in behavior.

thanks for any input on this

 

Dusan

storageserver-diagnostics-20191009-2129.zip

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Two SATA ports are set to IDE, this can cause issues with these AMD chipset, likely not a coincident the problem disk is using one of them, set them to AHCI/SATA, but should also replace the SATA cable to rule it out.

 

If the emulated disk can't be fixed by xfs_repair, and the actual disk is mounting correctly the best way forward it to do a new config and re-sync parity instead of rebuilding the disk, but only after doing the above.

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Thank you for your reply. I used your advice and have changed BIOS settings so now both of those above mentioned SATA ports should be set to AHCI/SATA as you suggested. Also tried to use different SATA port for that particular disk. However, UNRAID shows still the same behavior. The disk can be accessed by SMART check, but otherwise it looks like not to be there at all, it even doesn't show temperature and in list looks like when a disk is put in sleep mode.
Sending new diagnostics file reflecting BIOS change.

storageserver-diagnostics-20191011-0740.zip

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5 minutes ago, DusanBolek said:

UNRAID shows still the same behavior. The disk can be accessed by SMART check, but otherwise it looks like not to be there at all,

That's expected since the disk is disabled, since the emulated disk is mounting correctly you now need to rebuild.

https://wiki.unraid.net/Troubleshooting#Re-enable_the_drive

 

7 minutes ago, DusanBolek said:

I used your advice and have changed BIOS settings so now both of those above mentioned SATA ports should be set to AHCI/SATA as you suggested.

They are still in IDE mode.

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On 10/11/2019 at 10:05 AM, johnnie.black said:

They are still in IDE mode.

Thank you for pointing that out. I investigated the matter and found out that BIOS backup battery was dead, so after each unplugging off the computer, BIOS reverted to defaults including that above mentioned IDE mode. I replaced the battery and it looks OK now.

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