Remove inactive volumes on EDA500 expansion chassis

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.

The existance of "eda2" with "eda2-0"  and "eda3" with "eda3-0" says there is (probably only) one drive in each chassis that is out of sync.  It thinks there are two volumes with the same name, which it can't resolve.  And while it may seem obvious which one is the "true" volume by the amount of space used, that's not always the case.

The problem is that you really need to get past the stalled sync.  I'm assuming here that top shows it's eating up all the CPU throughput and that watch cat /proc/mdstat shows no progress in the re-sync and time to go just mounting up.  I've seen that before, and it often keeps other commands issued via SSH from working.

Whether something happend that drove all the volumes out of sync or if the resync of eda1 dominoed into messing up eda2 and eda3, it's hard to say.  I had a similar situation as your eda1 recently with an external eSATA 5 drive chassis (works like an EDA, but is from another company) and nothing I did could save that volume.  I resigned myself that it was lost, and I deleted the volume, re-created it, and restored from backup.  But before I did that, I booted with it not connected but my real EDA500 connected, and it booted.  Yours may as well and give you more information on which drive is the out of sync one.  If you can remove that drive and re-boot, the "phantom" volume should disappear and you can then put the drive back in, format it, and then let it re-sync.

Since you have three EDA's, you may want to boot with just one, get it working, then boot with the second.  Note that when you boot without it, the volume will still show up in the GUI as missing.  Don't destroy that unless you plan to start over with the EDA.  If you get one EDA volume working and want to keep it "safe" when working on another, do an export.  Note that once re-imported (whihc happens automatically when you boot with it attached), you will need to go back in and set protocols and permissions on the shares.  And this whole thing could move you to FlexRAID mode, where you could be stuck (assuming you aren't there already).

Note, too, that every time you boot with a sub-set of total drives, md0 (the OS partition) may need to sync.  It doesn't take long, but it's best not to power down while it's ongoing.