Remove inactive volumes on EDA500 expansion chassis

I have run an RN516 with three EDA500 expansion chassis for multiple years. Recently, an error where one disk in one of the expansions disconnected and then reconnected (on its own) triggered a resync. That process stalled wherein it would not progress past a certain percentage. So, I rebooted the system.

Now, two of the three chassis give the "remove inactive volume" messages. Five out of ten disks total, and none in the chassis that is (again) stalled in a resync.

I can SSH into the unit but the web front end doesn't land on the main page after accepting my username and password. I can see the proper volumes in data and eda1 (the main unit volume and one of the expansion volumes) and those shares are accessible to my Windows machine. Via the SSH command line, I can see directories for eda2 and eda3, but they show no shares / folders / files in them, unlike the data and eda1 volumes.

Since I can't get the front end to work, I can't download logs, but there were no disk errors reported via the front end or email. Trouble only started happening on those two expansions after the reboot. And I still don't know why the resync on eda1 keeps stalling.

I'm trying to get help via chat, but that is a laborious process due to no technicians being available. Is there anything I can try in the short term to get the volumes in eda2 and eda3 mounted again? Or any way to get the proper logs via the command line to post here?

Hopchen
Apr 11, 2019
Hi all

Just to follow up on this one for those interested.

jmaxlow was getting inactive volume error on both EDA-2 and EDA-3. The reason being that neither raid can start.
The raids cannot start because several disks in both EDAs are missing the data partition. EDA disks should have two partitions: 1 for the OS and 1 for the data. These are referenced to as partitions 1 and 3. Several disks are missing the data partition and thus the raids cannot run.

=== EDA-2 === 8 176 5860522584 sdl 8 177 4194304 sdl1 8 192 5860522584 sdm 8 193 4194304 sdm1 8 195 5855803936 sdm3 8 208 5860522584 sdn 8 209 4194304 sdn1 8 224 5860522584 sdo 8 225 4194304 sdo1 8 227 5855803936 sdo3 8 240 5860522584 sdp 8 241 4194304 sdp1
=== EDA-3 === 65 0 4883770584 sdq 65 1 4194304 sdq1 65 3 4879051936 sdq3 65 16 4883770584 sdr 65 17 4194304 sdr1 65 32 4883770584 sds 65 33 4194304 sds1 65 35 4879051936 sds3 65 48 4883770584 sdt 65 49 4194304 sdt1 65 64 4883770584 sdu 65 65 4194304 sdu1 65 67 4879051936 sdu3

I am a little baffled as to how this happened on so many disks. Perhaps there is a communications issue between the EDAs and the main chassis... Disks appear healthy.

Anyhow, this should be recoverable by copying over the partition table from "working" disks and thus restore the lost partitions. As long as nothing was over-written on those disks we should be good.

I recommended to reach out to NETGEAR and show them this.

Cheers

11 Replies

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jmaxlow
Aspirant
Apr 08, 2019
And now the web interface is inaccessible, with eda1's resync seemingly stuck at 14.08%. Here is my RAIDar result.

Is there an SSH command I can use to "restart" the web interface?
- StephenB
  Guru - Experienced User
  Apr 08, 2019
  Did you try downloading the logs from RAIDar?
  - jmaxlow
    Aspirant
    Apr 08, 2019
    RAIDar would ask for a username and password for the log download, but would then reject them, and would do the same for the graceful Restart.
    
    I had to do a hard restart. At that point (last night), I powered off the two troublesome expansion chassis so that FrontView would load and the resync on eda1 would continue. So now that resync is progressing. I can download the logs but they don't seem to contain any errors specific to eda2 and eda3 - no SMART errors and such. But the content on those two in the logs is not as voluminous as the content on the RN516 and eda1. Once it is finished (Wednesday?) I plan to turn eda2 and eda3 back on and try to get those logs.
    
    Would it be helpful to post what logs I have today, or what until the resync is finished and I attempt to turn the other two chassis back on?
    
    I am very much hoping that it's the case that the data on eda2 and eda3 is still there, and the arrays just need to be reassembled via the command line, but I pretty much have to wait until the resync on eda1 is done before chat support is willing to get more involved. I'm prepared to use Reclaime if I have to, but perhaps something simpler and faster will work.