Problems formatting new RAID

[valyyn]

Hiya,

I'm hoping someone can help me. I'm familiar with computers but this particular thing is new to me. I've got a 5Big Network 2 that I inherited with 5x500GB drives as a RAID 5 and has been working fine for a couple years. I wanted to upgrade it, so bought 5x2TB drives and popped them in. It's there that I learned about the OS being on the drives and I learned about fvdw-sl, which looks awesome.

Anyway, I've got fvdw-sl running on my NAS absolutely fine. I had all five drives showing up as initialised separately and it showed 10TB with five volumes, as you'd expect.

The problem I now have is creating the RAID5. I've created it and it shows up as volume "RD5-0", but the Format Type, Total Size and Free Size are all blank. I tried formatting it and it seems to be working OK, but then at some point (either towards the end of, or after) "Writing inode tables" it just loads back to the first setup screen and says I can restart the task.

I can't see any errors to tell why it's failing though.

This is what the onscreen log shows:

Code: Select all

Setup task format.sh is now running
Found disk: sda(MK0131YFG0XVDA)
Found disk: sdb(MK0131YFG118GA)
Found disk: sdc(MK0131YFG118LA)
Found disk: sdd(MK0131YFG0E3PA)
Found disk: sde(MK0131YFG11PMA)
Format partition md0 with file system ext3:
=>mke2fs 1.43.4 (31-Jan-2017)
Creating filesystem with 1950611968 4k blocks and 243826688 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 1be3aa1c-6104-4eb7-8513-ca6eb515a1c8
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848, 512000000, 550731776, 644972544, 1934917632
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables:

Setup task format.sh is restarting
Found disk: sda(MK0131YFG0XVDA)
Found disk: sdb(MK0131YFG118GA)
Found disk: sdc(MK0131YFG118LA)
Found disk: sdd(MK0131YFG0E3PA)
Found disk: sde(MK0131YFG11PMA)
Format partition md0 with file system ext3:
=>mke2fs 1.43.4 (31-Jan-2017)
Creating filesystem with 1950611968 4k blocks and 243826688 inodes
Filesystem UUID: dc2a620b-fbae-4e0e-b9f9-bf85639131e7
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848, 512000000, 550731776, 644972544, 1934917632
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: 335/59528

and I had a look in dmesg as I saw suggested elsewhere and there's just this:

Code: Select all

[24397.407111] md: md0 stopped.
[24397.511422] md/raid:md0: not clean -- starting background reconstruction
[24397.518171] md/raid:md0: device sda8 operational as raid disk 0
[24397.538522] md/raid:md0: device sde8 operational as raid disk 4
[24397.544420] md/raid:md0: device sdd8 operational as raid disk 3
[24397.558496] md/raid:md0: device sdc8 operational as raid disk 2
[24397.564395] md/raid:md0: device sdb8 operational as raid disk 1
[24397.590427] md/raid:md0: raid level 5 active with 5 out of 5 devices, algorit                                                                                                                                                             hm 2
[24397.668757] md0: detected capacity change from 0 to 7989706620928
[24397.678548] md: resync of RAID array md0


and nothing after it.

I've just cancelled the setup and gone back to the Disk Setup menu and noticed it now says this as the status:
"clean, resyncing completed: 14.2%, estimated time: 1640.9min"

So I'll try it again once that finishes, unless anyone has any ideas of why it's refusing to format? I'm not sure if there is another log file that would be more helpful, but let me know and I'll get logs you need! Thank you :)

Edit: the status is now just "clean completed: [0KB],, estimated time:"
https://i.imgur.com/ONeFG0C.jpg

[valyyn]

Ahh I worked it out! I think the problem was I was selecting all five disks and obviously it couldn't wipe disk A because that's what it's running off.

So I tried creating the RAID again, but this time I ticked to copy shares from disk A and it looks like it's worked! I now have a RAID showing up as 7440GB and all five drives.

Hope this helps someone else in future :-D

[Jocko]

Jocko

Ahh I worked it out! I think the problem was I was selecting all five disks and obviously it couldn't wipe disk A because that's what it's running off.

Nope it should and of course you would lose all data on sda8

So I tried creating the RAID again, but this time I ticked to copy shares from disk A and it looks like it's worked! I now have a RAID showing up as 7440GB and all five drives.

This option means the raid raid is builton two steps, without sda8 (degraded status) which allows to move later data from sda8 and then adds sda8 on the second step to get the redundancy

So in my opinion setup environment failed to umount sda8 because it is busy by a process but your are lucky because you would have lost your data on sda8 by this way

[valyyn]

This option means the raid is builton two steps, without sda8 (degraded status) which allows to move later data from sda8 and then adds sda8 on the second step to get the redundancy

Ahh I see, yeah it is currently "degraded, recovering". Once it finishes recovering, will it be OK/normal then?

So in my opinion setup environment failed to umount sda8 because it is busy by a process but your are lucky because you would have lost your data on sda8 by this way

Is there any other log file I could check to see what process was stopping it?

Thank you for your input Jocko - appreciate it! :-)

Edit:
Damn, came down the next morning and the RAID volume has vanished, but when I click "Initialise Hard Disks and Volumes", it says they are all raid members :(

I think I'll start again and load fvdw-sl from the beginning, see if I can work out what I did wrong last time.

[valyyn]

Ok, so after starting again it looks like it's going better - it let me add the RAID this time with no problems and now it's clean and resyncing.

So I will wait for that to finish then hopefully I'll be good to go!

[Jocko]

Hi

If you stop your nas where a a sync job is still running; This one will start again from the beginning when you will boot the nas.
So you need to wait, sync job takes a long time because you have a poorish CPU

[Jocko]

But according with your screen capture you do not have yet set a fs on the raid, this can be done later