Dear Community,

 

The old machine stopped working (1 or 2 years ago) since the pendrive broke. Upon replacing the pendrive I figured the board was also toast. This weekend (with some spare hardware) I made an attempt to get it all working. The old array has 8 HDDs connected to a IBM m1015 flashed to IT-Mode.

 

Not knowing the parity drive I added all old drives (4x3TB and 3x8TB) to a new array without parity drive selected. All except one 8TB drive were detected so I assume this is the parity drive. I shut down the array and proceeded to put the new server together (borrowed pieces - doesn’t matter - had to change things) and some hours of swapping hardware pieces  in and out I could get my 4 new harddrives to work (its SAS drives, I thought I bought SATA - NARF). In this process the SAS controller of the old array was swapped in and out too.

 

Once the new server had been put together and seemed to work I reconnected all the old drives to my IBM m1015 SAS controller and started unRaid.

I selected all the drives but the parity and started the array. For some reason 3of the 3TB drives could not be mounted (Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout)

- My guts tell me they didn’t break all together in a matter of hours. 

- SMART gives some warning about age, yes. 

- They are all Samsung drives, the other 3TB drive is Toshiba.

- They probably are REISERFS, maybe BTRFS, I don’t remember

- Reiserfsck -check gives Unknown code er3k 127, maybe the superblock is toast, maybe it’s not reiserfs

- I have read in the forums some people experience unmountable problems after upgrading unRaid, but I can not tell the exact version I am coming from (at least 1-2 years or more old)

 

At this point I am more than willing to ask for advice. Tower diagnostics attached.

 

My current best idea to solve the issue would be to ddrescue one of the unmountable drives to one of the still not used (much bigger) new drives and then start to tinker with reiserfs and BTRFS rescue tools. Since this will be a try and error approach, maybe it is possible to ddrescue into some form of virtual harddrive and tinker on this one. Has anyone experience with this? Any other advice? Is downgrading worth trying?

 

 

TLDR: Migrating an old array with broken pendrive and mainboard to a new one, upgrading UnRaid in the process, suddenly 3 drives are not recognized anymore (Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout). 

Yes, redundancy is no backup - I know - I am working on it..

 

Cheers,

boing

tower-diagnostics-20200905-1805.zip

The 1st 3 disks are mounting, there must be something about the controller the others are using that is giving that result. Probably you need to flash that RAID controller to IT mode.

 

 

The controller was flashed to IT mode already before the the pendrive broke and working fine then. All 7 drives are connected to this controller. I tried to hook up the troubled drives directly to the mainboard already: same result.

See if any of those unmountable disks mount with UD in read only mode.

It does not look like it, see screenshot.

Unraid can give an invalid partition error for various reasons like the MBR not conforming to what is expected or the partition not being the correct size, and that can happen when you for example change from a raid controller to a non raid controller or vice-versa, but in your case there are no partitions, so something else happened, if just the partitions are missing but the data is still there you can try unassigning one of the unmountable disks and starting the array, Unraid will recreate the partition and as long as the disks weren't wiped it might be able to rebuild it correctly, check if the emulated disk mounts and data looks correct, if it does, and only if it does, you can rebuild on top, then repeat for the other disks.

Just to add that the above can only work if parity is valid, and it won't be 100% valid if this was not done in read only mode:

19 hours ago, theboing said:

Not knowing the parity drive I added all old drives (4x3TB and 3x8TB) to a new array without parity drive selected.

Though if that was all you still might be able to get away with it, possibly needing to run xfs_repair on the emulated disk(s).

49 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Unraid can give an invalid partition error for various reasons like the MBR not conforming to what is expected or the partition not being the correct size, and that can happen when you for example change from a raid controller to a non raid controller or vice-versa, but in your case there are no partitions, so something else happened, if just the partitions are missing but the data is still there you can try unassigning one of the unmountable disks and starting the array, Unraid will recreate the partition and as long as the disks weren't wiped it might be able to rebuild it correctly, check if the emulated disk mounts and data looks correct, if it does, and only if it does, you can rebuild on top, then repeat for the other disks.

 

I think parity was fine. I didnt think I could rebuild 3 "failed" drives. Do the other drives need to be in the same positions as they were when parity was built? Because I have no idea in which order the used to be in that array back then.

 

 

Edited September 6, 20205 yr by theboing

5 minutes ago, theboing said:

I think parity was fine. I didnt think I could rebuild 3 "failed" drives.

You can, one at at time if, and it's a big if, data is still valid on those drives, just partition info is missing, still nothing to lose to try, at least up to the emulated disk, again just rebuild on top if the emulated disk mounts and contents look correct.

 

6 minutes ago, theboing said:

Do the other drives need to be in the same positions as they were when parity was built?

Not with single parity, you'd be doing a procedure similar to this, though for a different reason:

 

 

I will definetly try this. Right now I am preclearing the new drives and will wait for that to finish. Then I will swap all old drives back in.

Does it matter if I connect them to the IBM m1015 controller (IT mode) or the board?

 

Just to be sure:

- I will create an array with all old drives and make sure to check "parity already valid"

- I will start the array and 3 drives will be unmountable

- I will stop the array and unassign 1 unmountable drive

- I will start the array again and check on the now emulated drive for files

If I find some files there, is it safe to assume its all there?

 

 

26 minutes ago, theboing said:

Does it matter if I connect them to the IBM m1015 controller (IT mode) or the board?

No.

 

26 minutes ago, theboing said:

Just to be sure:

- I will create an array with all old drives and make sure to check "parity already valid"

- I will start the array and 3 drives will be unmountable

- I will stop the array and unassign 1 unmountable drive

- I will start the array again and check on the now emulated drive for files

Correct.

 

26 minutes ago, theboing said:

If I find some files there, is it safe to assume its all there?

Would think so, but if the emulated disk is unmountable run a filesystem check, some corruption is possible due to starting the array when you did it to identify parity, if that doesn't work best bet is running a partition repair utility like testdisk on those disks, then if it can be fixed mount the disks with UD and copy the data to the array.

On 9/6/2020 at 2:12 PM, theboing said:

I will definetly try this.

Did you try it already? Some info came to light that your problem might just be corrupt GPT tables, and if it's that it could be fixed without rebuilding the disks.