My Buddie has (9) - WD15EARS that includes parity in his Unraid system with the latest 4.7 final on his flash and all drives have jumper installed. He wants to wipe out everything on the whole system and start fresh without any data on the drives.  What would be the best way to do this? Kinda like formatting all the drives as new.

 

Thanks in adavance

 

JM

Some people would LOVE to do that. I would imagine stop the array. UN-assign all devices and go to town!

 

 

I'm assuming you mean he wants to remove the jumpers as well in the process?

 

There's no point in doing so, but if he really wants to have all the additional headache and trouble and issues that goes along with it...

 

He should stop the array, unassign all the drives, then start the array. He may need to do an initconfig from the shell prompt. No drives should show as being assigned in the array.

 

Once that's done, he can shutdown the system. With the power off, he should remove all the jumpers. He can then power on the system. He will likely have to execute a command to zero out the MBR on each and every single drive dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd# bs=512 count=64 or similar with /dev/sd# replaced with the actual drives.

 

After that is done, he may need to reboot the system for unRAID to detect the drives again. He should then start building the array as he wants and selecting Advanced Format alignment.

 

I'm sure Joe L can shed more light on the details.

 

He wants leave the jumpers on. He just wants to clear off all the drives and start over fresh.

 

 

Thanks for all your help.

 

JM

Why?

 

The reason might yield some clues as to what he means by starting over - and how to not make the same mistakes again.

 

If it is just a matter of deleting all of the data, that is far easier than some of the ideas above.

I asked him why and he said he thinks he may have had some with jumpers and some without and would like to make sure he does it right this time. So i see why he wants to start over to insure he does it right this time.  Sorry for the lack of info.

 

He would like to have all the jumpers on.

 

Thanks

I can't really think of any reason to do this, but I can understand the desire to be "CERTAIN" that everything's consistent.

 

As I understand it, UnRAID won't re-clear or re-format the disks, since they all have existing UnRAID MBRs on them.     The simplest way to be sure the system "starts over" with these disks is to wipe out the current partition structure.

 

Just boot to a a partition management tool with a bootable CD;  delete the current partitions from the drives;  and then boot to UnRAID with an initialized configuration file (disk.cfg).     Then just create the new array.    Before doing this, of course, either add jumpers to the drives that don't have them;  or remove all of them from the ones that do.    Since your friend's running 4.7, it would seem the better course of action would be to remove all the jumpers and set UnRAID to format these on 4k boundaries -- then any future changes won't require jumpering a new drive.

 

The command to wipe out the MBRs from a running system with the array stopped was already provided, so no need for any additional software or boot cds or programs. Obviously replace /dev/sd# with the appropriate drive, such as /dev/sda or /dev/sdf. Be careful to make sure you do not zero out your FLASH drive.

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd# bs=512 count=64 

I asked him why and he said he thinks he may have had some with jumpers and some without and would like to make sure he does it right this time.

 

I think you should get a clarification from him to know exactly what he wants to accomplish.

 

This is what I would do if I had some drives without jumpers and just had to fix them;

Set the 4k Aligned setting on the config page.

Run a parity check and make sure it completes with no errors.

Stop the array.

Unassign one unjumpered drive. Note the port (ie sda) number from the devices pages.

Start the array.

Use the dd command on the drive.

Stop the array.

Reassign the drive.

Start the array and allow unRAID to rebuild the drive. He will probably have to check the "Are you sure" box.

 

 

The other option is to do it for all the drives at the same time and lose data;

Set the 4k-Aligned setting on the devices page.

Stop the array.

Use the dd command on all of the unjumpered drives.

Run the initconfig command and answer with Yes.

Start the array and format the drives and let the parity build.

He will lose the data on every drive without a jumpers.

 

I would leave the jumpered drives alone. I would also not bother installing jumpers on any drives without jumpers.

 

Peter

 

I'm assuming you mean he wants to remove the jumpers as well in the process?

 

There's no point in doing so, but if he really wants to have all the additional headache and trouble and issues that goes along with it...

 

He should stop the array, unassign all the drives, then start the array. He may need to do an initconfig from the shell prompt. No drives should show as being assigned in the array.

 

Once that's done, he can shutdown the system. With the power off, he should remove all the jumpers. He can then power on the system. He will likely have to execute a command to zero out the MBR on each and every single drive dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd# bs=512 count=64 or similar with /dev/sd# replaced with the actual drives.

 

After that is done, he may need to reboot the system for unRAID to detect the drives again. He should then start building the array as he wants and selecting Advanced Format alignment.

 

I'm sure Joe L can shed more light on the details.

 

 

I did PM Joe L. and he suggested that i keep it in the forum as to help others who may need to do the same thing. I had him do each step outlined here and he never did see format come up on any of the drives. He went ahead let the parity build and it finished without any errors but still had all his old data on each drive. Joe L sugested the following below.

 

Stop array, Un-assign all drives, then power down, remove all the jumpers

Then, power up

For each drive, run

dd if=/dev/zero count=8 of=/dev/sdX

(where sdX = the device for each disk)

 

Then run the preclear_disk.sh script on each disk, the re-assign and type

initconfig

to set a new disk configuration.

Answer "Yes"

 

I will let my buddie know to try this and will post back here.

 

Thanks to everyone for your help.

Hate to be blunt but he did something wrong. Clearing the MBR would make the drive appear unformatted...

 

Also, it's just a waste of time to clear and reformat drives which have the jumper already.

 

Peter

 

Ok i finally had a chance to go over in person and preform all the steps and now its working just fine! Thanks for you help everyone.