I moved Unraid from one computer system to another so I could increase the amount of RAM. In so doing I could also move the two drives I have housed in a USB enclosure to the new system since it has more room. I thought running the drives via SATA would be faster than USB3. However, when I move the drives they are detected by Unraid but can't be mounted (relinked?). The only way I get them working is to keep them in the USB enclosure. Is there a way to move the drives to the computer itself so I can run them attached to the SATA ports?

That's one of the reasons USB enclosures are not recommended, some use a smaller partition layout, and that won't be accepted by Unraid, you should be able to rebuild one disk at a time, assuming single parity, you can test first and make sure the emulated disk is mounting correctly, if yes rebuild on top with the disk connect via SATA.

On 1/30/2020 at 11:27 AM, johnnie.black said:

That's one of the reasons USB enclosures are not recommended, some use a smaller partition layout, and that won't be accepted by Unraid, you should be able to rebuild one disk at a time, assuming single parity, you can test first and make sure the emulated disk is mounting correctly, if yes rebuild on top with the disk connect via SATA.

So what you're talking about is a bit foreign to me. I have my media drive and it has a single parity. Is there a link you can direct me to walk me through the steps to rebuild the drives as you recommended? I'd prefer not to buy a new drive at the moment if I can help it.

 

One thing I considered was pull the parity drive, format it, and then transfer the current media files over to the newly formatted drive, then take the old drive and make it the new parity drive. Would that be a safe way of doing it?

Just to confirm, when you connect the disk to a SATA port what error do you get? "Unmountable: invalid partition" or is it a different one?

10 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Just to confirm, when you connect the disk to a SATA port what error do you get? "Unmountable: invalid partition" or is it a different one?

Unfortunately I don't remember off the top of my head. I do remember it saying it was unmountable but don't recall what it said after. Sorry I can't offer more at the moment.

Connect one of the USB drives to a SATA port, if the error is the one above stop the array, unassign that disk, start array, if the emulated disk mounts correctly you can rebuild on top, just stop the array again, re-assign the disk and start array to begin rebuild, then repeat for the other disks.

On 2/11/2020 at 10:53 AM, johnnie.black said:

Connect one of the USB drives to a SATA port, if the error is the one above stop the array, unassign that disk, start array, if the emulated disk mounts correctly you can rebuild on top, just stop the array again, re-assign the disk and start array to begin rebuild, then repeat for the other disks.

So I was wrong, I'm not seeing an error message per se,  all I'm seeing is "Wrong" with no indication as to what is wrong.

15 hours ago, thunderclap said:

all I'm seeing is "Wrong" with no indication as to what is wrong.

That's because the devices identification changed, if you know which drive is which you can do a new config and trust parity, but then can still have the partition problem.

So yes... I'm still working on this.

I've attached two screen captures, the first shows the array after I moved the Parity drive and had it do a 14 hour rebuild. As you can see it shows the proper drive name/serial. The main drive, the one that has all my media on it, shows that it will be overwritten. Obviously I'm very nervous in doing anything to the drive that might mess it up. Since the serial number on the main drive, the one that's in a USB house, shows a generic number and not the WD number like the Parity now does, if I just do a re-config will it see the drive and realize that it's been formatted for unraid and find all the files without it being erased?

Like mentioned above the correct procedure here would have been a new config, no need to re-sync parity. (Tools -> New config), but note:

On 2/17/2020 at 7:34 AM, johnnie.black said:

but then can still have the partition problem.

 

So final report: I did a new config, moved the drive from the USB enclosure to SATA, started it back up and assigned the drives appropriately. Everything came back up fine. It has to re-parity, but I'm fine with that. I just didn't want to lose the data. I appreciate your assistance, tee-tee jorge.