[SOLVED] Please help me not lose my data


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I recently bought my UNRAID license.

I installed a New 3TB drive

 

Which now made my configuration:

Parity = 3 TB WD RED

Disk 1 = 2 TB WD Green

Disk 2 = 1 TB WD Black

Disk 3 = 3TB WD RED (the new one)

 

All went well with the installation of the new disk.  I moved a whole load of stuff from an external drive to the UNRAID.

 

I went away on business,  and now have come back to find that the new 3TB drive dropped off the array.

It does not seem like it is a simple matter of just adding it back in...

 

Can you please lead this horse to water,  so that I don't lose my precious data.

 

Attached is a screenshot of my system as it stands.

 

 

Thanks.

unraid.jpg.b5d5afeab21010ec9e7c4fcda3fdd26e.jpg

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Important!  Please act on item 1 ASAP!

 

1. You have the honor of opening a new chapter in the long and sad HPA saga!  You have a Gigabyte motherboard that is creating HPA's on your drives.  At this point, you have 3 drives with HPA's, one with the old-style Gigabyte HPA of 2113 sectors, and 2 with a new-style HPA of 8257 sectors, essentially 4 times as big.  Just going out on a limb, I'd guess that it is 4 times larger to hold a newer UEFI BIOS.  What is especially bad is that it now clobbers 4 times as many of your sectors as it used to!  2 of the drives have complaints about end of partition is not correct, meaning they have been clobbered and partition size was shrunk (Reiser file system may also be damaged).  I assume a parity check has already, or will show numerous errors at the very end of the check.  ASAP, reboot and go into your BIOS settings and disable the option to save a copy of the BIOS to disk!  I don't know for sure what it is called, others can help better there.  Off-topic tech note - I took at a look at the 2 HPA sector count numbers and noticed a relation, the older one appears to be 2K+65, the newer one appears to be 8K+65.

 

2. The syslog is telling a different story from what you believe happened.  It says that at 20:26:57, you added Disk 3, but when the screen refreshed at 20:27:20 (just half a minute later) Disk 3 was NOT assigned!  Somehow, you must have (probably accidentally) unassigned it.  Seconds later, you started the array, and it started exactly as it had been starting, with the original 2 data drives.  I know you probably don't want to believe that, but I believe I can help you confirm this.  There is no evidence of Disk 3 being formatted in the syslog.  *If* Disk 3 had been assigned, you would have seen a prompt to format (and possibly clear) Disk 3, and you would have seen a check box that had to be checked first before it would continue.  If your Disk 3 had been Precleared, then it would have taken a couple of minutes to format, and then the array would start and be ready shortly thereafter, with 3 data drives.  If the drive had not been Precleared, then it would have had to be cleared for several hours and the array would not start until that had completed, then it too would be formatted, and finally the array would start.  I'm hoping you can remember whether you saw a prompt to format Disk 3.  This explanation by the way is the only way that the pic you attached makes sense.  I suspect all the copying you did was to User Shares, and while you may believe it went to Disk 3, the files are probably on Disk 1 and Disk 2.

 

3. You had another disk (with an HPA) that dropped off completely, then was recovered!  This disk is your WD1002FAEX, sdf, a 1TB drive you do not have assigned and don't appear to be using.  This for me was the second really astonishing thing in your syslog, a drive that suddenly failed to respond, was disabled by the system, then later was fully recovered, and recovered still assigned to sdf!  This is the very first time I have ever seen a drive successfully recovered like this, without rebooting.  I can't make too much of it, because since it was not assigned by UnRAID at all, I really don't how UnRAID would have handled a drive that was lost, then found again.

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Thanks for the reply.  Would it help if I were to replace the board also.

It's overkill, but certainly, because only Gigabyte has this HPA 'feature'.  They wanted to 'help' you, by providing another way to save a copy of the BIOS.  However, Gigabyte boards are very good, apart from this issue.  Changing motherboards is a lot of work.  All you should need to do is turn off that one feature in the BIOS, and then you'll have a good board.

 

Another question to clarify... does this mean that real damage has occurred to the hard drive that I can't get around ?

No, not physical damage.  It just means that the Gigabyte BIOS on boot will save a copy of the current BIOS to the end of a chosen disk.  If it has'nt done that before to the disk it chooses, it automatically shrinks the partition, then creates an HPA region over the very last 2113 or 8257 sectors of the drive, then overwrites them with a copy of the BIOS.  You almost never have any files stored there, because that means you have completely filled the drive.  But the Reiser file system *may* have stuff there, and has its own idea where the end of the partition is, so may report an error in partition size.  The problem in UnRAID though is that the parity drive contains parity info for EVERY single bit of that drive, including the bits of those last sectors.  Since it has now been changed, parity is WRONG for all of those sectors, and if you had to rebuild *any* drive, they would be wrongly rebuilt for those sectors.  A correcting parity check will correct the parity info, but report numerous errors during the processing of those sectors.

 

If you want to remove the existing HPA's, please see the HPA topic.

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I cannot find out how to turn off this feature -  I have looked through all the documentation.  I jut don't see it.  If your more discerning eyes can spot it,  the manual is here :

http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Manual/motherboard_manual_ga-ma78gm-s2h_e.pdf

 

Out of interest  - if I were to change boards,  how difficult is it ?  Also,  does unraid work ok with an E350 AMD APU ?

 

Thanks.

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Most motherboard manuals are lousy and dont explain the bios settings in detail. Replacing the MoBo is a pretty straightforward. Just need to make sure you change the mac address in network.cfg in your flash drive in case you are planning on using the same board on another machine on the same network.

 

I had one machine with E350IAE45 MoBo and it worked pretty well as just a media server. Dont expect to run too many processor intensive plugins on the processor though, I guess.

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I cannot find out how to turn off this feature -  I have looked through all the documentation.  I jut don't see it.  If your more discerning eyes can spot it,  the manual is here :

http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Manual/motherboard_manual_ga-ma78gm-s2h_e.pdf

 

It is XpressRecovery you want to turn off, but the version shown in the manual does not appear to have a way to turn it off.  If I recall, that was true of early versions of the Gigabyte BIOS, but they updated it and added a switch to turn it off.  I noticed your BIOS version is from 2009, which may be an early one.  Check for a newer BIOS.

 

I also noted one item near the bottom of the manual (section 5-3-1, the FAQ) - to see Advanced BIOS settings, use the Ctl-F1 key within the BIOS settings to see some hidden advanced settings.  The manual does not say what that may turn up.

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I am going to ditch the Gigabyte board.  It uses too much power anyhow.  Can you just help me with this one... I am going to install my Asus C60M board in there.  So.. I can just take out the existing mobo and cpu and replace with the C60 ?  ... and change the mac address in network.cfg on the flash drive.. simple as that .... ?

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I am going to ditch the Gigabyte board.  It uses too much power anyhow.  Can you just help me with this one... I am going to install my Asus C60M board in there.  So.. I can just take out the existing mobo and cpu and replace with the C60 ?  ... and change the mac address in network.cfg on the flash drive.. simple as that .... ?

If there is a MAC address delete the line.

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Went to my Flash drive.... opened \config\network.cfg

 

There was no MAC entry...just this:

 

# Generated settings:

USE_DHCP="no"

IPADDR="192.168.1.119"

NETMASK="255.255.255.0"

GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"

DHCP_KEEPRESOLV="yes"

DNS_SERVER1="192.168.1.1"

DNS_SERVER2="XXXXXXXXX"

DNS_SERVER3="XXXXXXXXX"

 

And the problem that I am seeing is that the boot is being held up.

 

What am i missing (apart from a few brain cells) ?

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

OK  so my problems have not gone away;  This is what I have done:

 

1. I have changed motherboard to the Asus C60M. This itself works fine. 

2.  I performed a ChkDsk on the Flashdrive

 

When trying assign the second WD 3TB drive to the array,  EVERYTIME when I try to restart the array,  I lose the parity drive.  I then have to re-do a parity synch.  This takes a day to do.

 

I am really at my wits end.

 

This is what I am think might have happened.... I think that I might have accidentally at some point, when trying to add the second WD3TB drive to the array,  have set the second drive as the parity,  and performed a synch.... then when I tried to add the other WD3TB (which I had thought was the pre-cleared second WD3TB drive), I was in fact adding the original parity drive back.  And hence why it keeps crapping out.

 

If this is the case,  then presumably then,  I should perform a new pre-clear on the drive and then try to re-add.  Do I need to pre-clear again  (and should I do it three times, again),  or is formatting in this case, sufficient.

 

Log attached.

 

Please help.

 

 

 

log11.txt

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