I have been running a plex server from windows 10 and wanted to try unraid after hearing alot of talk about this. 

Adaptec ASR 71605 raid controller with 3 12Tb drives in raid 5

sabertooth x58 asus motherboard with a couple mixed size drives I use onboard sata

8Tb usb that I have used more for backups

Using the latest stable build of unraid (dont remember off hand ver)

 

I have alot of movies on my plex server on the array I am using under windows and since I was using a external raid controller I was told I might be able to mount the array without the need to reformat. I was able to see the array and set it up and started. I then went to plugins and installed the CA plugin and went to choose a plex setup and none would do a download. I located settings and dockers and it was showing that it couldnt find the path. I went back and looked at the array and noticed at the right that it said "unmountable : unsupported layout". I tried most all the suggestions with no luck, and I even tried each and every drive that I had and every one of them said unmountable. I went on my bios and dissabled the onboard sata controllers and just used the external raid controller and there was no change. Unraid sees the drives and the name and size of each one, but will not mount any of them. I am trying not to format as it would take forever to get my plex server rebuilt to test and see if I wanted to stay with unraid or not.

I dont know what other info you would need but I am baffled and dont know if I can even run unraid.

 

Please understand I am very new to this so I may take longer to understand what you are explaining. Some things I grasp fast and others I dont.

 

thank you for any assistance.

 

Lane

 

P.S.

I am now cancer free

4 hours ago, gator81 said:

and since I was using a external raid controller I was told I might be able to mount the array without the need to reformat.

You were given wrong information, Unraid needs to format any array and cache device used, also Unraid is not raid, you shouldn't use any raid controllers, all disks should be used individually connected to non-raid controllers.

This is a surprise as I know a few people personally that are using raid controllers to run unraid with no issues, that is why i posed the question as they could'nt figure out why mine didnt work and theirs did. They also added drives that already had data on them and they where usable without the need to reformat. Two of them are using the exact same raid card that I have and their unraid is working fine. I will ask them again and let them know what you said as this is strange.

14 hours ago, gator81 said:

They also added drives that already had data on them and they where usable without the need to reformat.

That's only possible if they are passing through the controller+drives to a VM running on Unraid.

This is what I have been able to do so far. I took a small drive and let unraid format it as that seem to be the only way that it would write the info to run any dockers and to share drives. It would see the other drives and my other array but would not mount.

I was now able to install dockers, where before I could only install plugins. So besides installing CA I found a plugin called unassigned devices and it would allow me to mount the array and any other drives. It would seem to not mount as a drive but as a folder but I could use the data from the drives, copy anything from them to the formated drive and even install plex and get it working. I was also using another docker called Krusader to help and it made it somewhat easier.

 

Now I seen it could be done that way I did go ahead and backup everything I had on my array on the raid controller and then re loaded unraid and mounted and let it format the unmounted device. After that it mounted and I used the app to mount the drive I backed everything up to and have been copying the files back which should take some time yet.

 

So in short, I can run unraid using a raid controller that i configured 3 drives in raid 5 and was able to format the drives with xfs in unraid and using them with no problems. Also on this same raid controller I added a 4th drive as a stand alone drive in which was formated ntfs for windows and was used to backup my files to and use the docker to mount it and copy back the files.

None of these are running on a vm, i am using the usb thumb drive to directly boot a computer. I guess unraid could load as a vm but I am still learning right now. I know I didnt configure any vm's from unraid for the drives unless that is what the docker programs are doing?

I didn't say you couldn't use the raid controller without a VM, though it's not recommended at all, I said you couldn't use the existing filesystem.

I am sorry If I miss understood anything, I am still very new at this and trying to figure out what I can

No problem, feel free to ask any other questions, regular forum users are usually very helpful.