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RN 516 - Remove inactive volumes to use the disk #4 – ghost volume
My device is running latest firmware 6.8.1 and has one raid 5 set of 6x6tb disk as data. Now the volume page shows disk 4 as a additional raid5 named data-1. On the message line appears “Remove inact...
Yes, SDD (drive 4) is not a part ot MD126 (the second layer in your volume). Either the expansion did not go as it should when you added drive 4, or the NAS has "lost" that partition. But now it looks like it has found the lost partition and declared it to be a separate incomplete volume.
You may want to wait for mdgm-ntgr or one of the other Netgear mods to concur, but it looks to me like that's exactly why they changed the OS to be more aggressive in looking for lost volumes and that deleting it will do the trick. Whether it will then re-sync and add the lost space into the volume is another thing. You may need to remove the drive, delete the partitions, and let it start from there. But that would be far less work that a factory default and restore.
Your data is already at risk; I recommend backing it up.
This particular issue is complex (has multiple root causes), so Netgear Support is in the best position to troubleshoot it. If you are the original purchaser, and purchased between 1 June 2014 and 31 May 2016 then you have free lifetime chat support for your NAS at my.netgear.com.
If you purchased new, but not within that timeframe, then you can still use paid support. Per-incident support is cheapers.
I have backups. I am the original purchaser I the device is from 2014 and registered. How can we proceed?
As I suggested, IMO your best option is my.netgear.com.
BTW, I don't work for Netgear - just a member of the community.
It sounds like drive 4 has problems. Is it a "green" drive? They can cause this kind of problem. Anything you do has the potential to make matters worse, so having that backup is all important. If you don't have free chat and don't want to get paid support, there are a couple of things you can do. But don't do them unless you are prepared for the possibility you will lose the whole volume and have to re-build from scratch.
The first step is no risk. Download the system logs and look in the smart_history.log for any SMART errors and in system.log for any other clues.
If drive 4 does have errors, shut down the system and test the drive connected to a PC with manufacturer's tools (such as Seatools). It would be a good idea to test the rest, too. Make sure you keep track of which drive is which. Swapping out the wrong drive is one of the biggest risks if a replacement drive is called for.
If just one drive (4, probably) is bad, boot the system without that drive. It should come up and have just the one volume, but complain it is degraded.. Now buy a replacment and install it , with power on, in place of the removed drive and let it resync. There is some risk that another drive will fail during re-sync, which would kill your volume and you would need to replace that one as well and start from scratch with your NAS and backup.
This next step has the highest risk. If none of the drives come up as bad, you can still try booting without drive 4 since that's the one it's complaining about. Booting in read-only mode may reduce the risk. If that works, remove the partitions on the drive using a PC, and install it back in the NAS. You may have to re-boot out of read-only mode before adding the drive back -- I'm not sure. It will then resync as well. If you get errors during the sync process, then the drive probably just isn't going to behave well in the NAS.
I had this happen to one of my drives and, though Seatools said it was fine, it kept failing in the NAS. And it wasn't even a green drive.
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