[SOLVED] Lost Data/New Drives

Hey all,

Seems I've screwed the pooch somewhere along the line with fixing my dying drive.

I had a dying drive, I switched out the 2TB parity I had, put in the new 6TB parity then switched out the old dying 2 TB for the old 2TB parity and I seem to have lost a tone of stuff.

My idea to fix it is to remove the old 2 TB parity (and now totally empty after UNRAID tried to rebuild then formatted it) and put back in the old dying drive, then let the system try to rebuild the array again to the parity. Then switch out the dying drive for a new stable one.

Will this work? I'm thinking in theory it should?

Help I've got mself in a right confused state at this point!

No - I think this will not work as your parity is probably no longer valid.  However I could be wrong if I have misunderstood what process you actually followed.

I guess the first question is whether the swap-disable process you seem to have followed appeared to run to completion.  There should have been two phases - the first where the parity was copied to the new 6TB drive, and then a second phase where the contents of the failed disk was rebuilt onto what was previously the parity drive.  If the second stage was never reached then your suggested solution just might work.  However if the second phase started which you implied that it had then it definitely will not work.

It might be worth posting a screenshot of the unRAID Main tab from the GUI to show the current state from the unRAID point of view.

Assuming that unRAID thinks you now have a valid array, then the best chance of getting data of the problem disk will be to try mounting it outside the array to copy data off it. This will require you to have a way of plugging that drive in - either via an additional SATA slot or via a USB adapter.  One of the features of unRAID is that each disk has a self-contained file system which is what makes this a possibility.

Ah that makes sense.

Swap-disable never gave me the second step, and this may well be due to how I had run out of SATA ports on the unraid server and switched out the parity drives first then tried to swap the drives around. Basically I made this mess for myself. I didn't want to risk running unraid without parity as that drive was on it's last legs, though I suspect I can probably save most of it's contents with enough time.

Looks like my best option will be to get my hands on a USB/SATA connection and try to copy everything off the drive.

Quick question around that, will windows recognise it if it's just plugged in or are there any tricks I need to do?

Thanks!

I'll update once I have tried it too!

It looks as if you did not actually follow the swap-disable process.  Unfortunate as it would not have required an additional SATA port.  It looks as if the process you followed means that unRAID lost track of the data from the problem disk so you have ended up with the replacement set up with an empty file system..

in terms of getting data off the current problem disk, Windows will not natively recognize a Reiserfs formatted disk.  However you can get the tool from here that would allow you to read the problem disk on a Windows system as long as it has not physically failed to get files off it.

Yeah blatantly my fault, we were leaving for our holiday and I was rushing around trying to get it done, and didn't want to risk leaving it with no back up, in the end the last parity run took it well into our holiday.

Brilliant I'll get that tool, I've got myself a USB/SATA on order and I'll I'll update once it's solved.

Hopefully someone else will savbe themselves the pain!

So I've got DiskInternals Linux Reader running...2 hours and 1% of reading the file tree...gives you an idea of how the drive is barely running.

I'm hoping once it gets over the bad sectors the speed picks up, but it's looking promising. Thanks!

EDIT: It just completed. 20k of files it couldn't read (no nothing really) and the rest is currently exporting back onto the main array.

Thanks again!! Hopefully people will see my errors in future.