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Forum Discussion
Issue with hard drive upgrade and xraid
Hi everyone, Hoping someone can lend some help and maybe provide a solution. I am helping a friend out with her ReadyNAS. She's not big on being on forums or social media so relaying things f...
leo037 wrote:
She had eight 10TB drives in it and now all eight 16TB drives in volume 1
And the volume size remains about 63.6 TiB?
Has she tried rebooting?
yes....
leo037 wrote:
yes....
I'd be willing to take a look at the log zip - if she is ok with that, you should send them with a PM (private message). You do that using the envelope link in the upper right of the forum page.
The logs would need to be put into cloud storage (dropbox, google drive, etc), with a download link in the PM.
There is some privacy leakage - if email alerts are configured, I'd see the email address, for example.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the volume is not expanded". Do you mean that the volume didn't expand at all, that the volume didn't expand to the additional space on the last drive, or what? The NAS certainly believes your volume is expanded, and I suspect it did expand when the first few drives were swapped with XRAID enabled.. By "the last drive", do you mean the last of all 8, or some number less? If something less, that's the expected behavior of FlexRAID.
As for that message, unfortunately, you gave bad advice. What she is seeing is simply "the way it works". It wasn't always the case, but it's been the case since at least 6.9.something when I ran into this same situation. If you have a multi-level FlexRAID volume, switching (back) to XRAID is not allowed. I don't understand why this is the case since, AFAIK, all FlexRAID expansion is exactly as XRAID would have done it, there are just fewer options. It's clearly not a bug since the message correctly tells you what's going on, so programmer laziness seems most likely. While I also had an EDA500 at the time I discovered this, I don't believe that's a part of the issue. I recall I ran some experiments proving otherwise.
If it really didn't expand (completely) and all drives were replaced, then perhaps StephenB can help with that.
Unless somebody at Netgear who is familiar with what the OS is looking at to prevent the switch and how to work around it gives some advice here (and they didn't a few years ago when I first reported this behavior), her only solution to get back to XRAID is to destroy and re-create the volume. There may be no need to do that now, but it will be necessary if she ever wants to increase the size of less than the full complement of drives. That she has an EDA500 may create some issues even when doing that, as the NAS may want to convert the EDA volume to the primary volume (which is a really bad idea). When I took the plunge and did this, I first exported the EDA volume, then destroyed and re-created the main volume, then imported the EDA.
I'm not sure how else to explain that larger drives were installed and sync'd and the volume did not expand/increase in capacity, etc, etc.
It is stuck at its original size yet the system thinks that it is expanded.
sent you a message
leo037 wrote:
sent you a message
Thx.
One aspect here - the system has been expanded several times. The original disks were 4 TB, with later expansions to 6 TB, 10 TB, and now 16 TB. As a result, the system has 4 different RAID groups in the data volume - md124, md125, md126, and md127. These are all concatenated together to form the data volume. When you replace a disk, all of these groups need to be resynced.
Physically, each of these groups has a corresponding partition on each disk. Looking at disks 1-5 (sda-sde), these partitions look like this:
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 64 8388671 4.0 GiB FD00 2 8388672 9437247 512.0 MiB FD00 3 9437248 7814033072 3.6 TiB FD00 4 7814033080 11721045119 1.8 TiB FD00 5 11721045120 19532873679 3.6 TiB FD00 6 19532873680 31251759055 5.5 TiB FD00(The first two partitions are for the OS and swap, and not part of the data volume).
But the final partition (number 6) has not been created on disk 6 (sdf). The serial number is 2BKLVLET
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 64 8388671 4.0 GiB FD00 2 8388672 9437247 512.0 MiB FD00 3 9437248 7814033072 3.6 TiB FD00 4 7814033080 11721045119 1.8 TiB FD00 5 11721045120 19532873679 3.6 TiB FD00It is also missing from RAID group md127:
md124 : active raid5 sda5[6] sdf5[11] sde5[10] sdd5[9] sdc5[8] sdb5[7] 19528915840 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU] md125 : active raid5 sda4[6] sdf4[11] sde4[10] sdd4[9] sdc4[8] sdb4[7] 9766874560 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU] md126 : active raid5 sda3[6] sdf3[11] sde3[10] sdd3[9] sdc3[8] sdb3[7] 19510833920 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU] bitmap: 0/30 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk md127 : active raid5 sda6[0] sde6[4] sdd6[3] sdc6[2] sdb6[1] 23437242368 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/5] [UUUUU]Since the system is running FlexRAID (RAID-5), all the RAID groups need to include all the disks in order for the system to expand.
There's not enough info in the log zip to see why this partition wasn't created, and then added to md127. But the disk does appear healthy.
I suggest removing the disk, and connecting it to a PC. From there, you can either unformat the disk (deleting all the "volumes" on it using the Windows disk manager), or just format it. Then you can add it back to the NAS. If you choose to reformat it, then you will then have to format it again in the NAS before the system will add it back to the data volume.
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