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RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

sectoid
Aspirant

RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Hello,

 

I had 4 seagate 3TB drives on my ReadyNAS 104 firmware 6.7.4, using RAID 6. One of them went bad, so I exchanged it for a seagate 4TB drive. After a few days resyncing, it finished without errors. Later I had to buy an hdd for another purpose so I decided to buy another 4TB drive for the readynas and use one of the 3TB ones for this other purpose. This way I would have 2x1TB spare and could create another volume.

 

I did a hot swap: removed the 3TB drive, waited for the removal recognition, and then inserted the new 4TB drive. As in the last time, it started resyncing. When it was about 40%, my 1-year old son turned the readynas off. I turned it on again and it resumed resyncing, but all my shares became inaccessible and the admin page showed all the drives red.

 

The resyncing process just finished and the drives remain red. I'm attaching a picture, it shows my RAID-6 volume and another unknown volume that I don't know what is. When I put the mouse over my RAID 6 volume, a popup appears saying "Remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk #1,2,3,4". This is also shown as those yellow messages that appear in any screen.

 

How can I recover my data properly?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

readynas104.png

 

Model: RN104|ReadyNAS 100 Series
Message 1 of 14

Accepted Solutions
jak0lantash
Mentor

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade


@sectoid wrote:

I tried using SSH to create a dmesg log myself but I couldn't because I got the error "dmesg: write failed: No space left on device"!! My HDDs have plenty of space but of course it's referring to the internal space of the NAS.


It's not referring to the Flash card but to the OS volume created on the HDDs.

You see, there are three volumes created on the HDDs, the OS, the swap and the data (multiple pieces for data in certain cases).

If it tells you that there is no space left when trying to extract the logs, that would mean that the OS volume is full. Sometimes, this prevents the data volume from being mounted.

 

Can you check with df -h if md0 is full?

If it is, follow these steps: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/RN314-FW-6-7-1-root-partition-full-how-to-fix/m...

View solution in original post

Message 7 of 14

All Replies
jak0lantash
Mentor

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

I can't see the screenshot as it wasn't approved yet.

Download the logs from the GUI, search for md127 in dmesg.log and paste an extract here.

 

Maybe you want to upvote this "idea" as well: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-for-ReadyNAS/Change-the-incredibly-confusing-error-me...

Message 2 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Thanks for the reply! I can't download the logs, I get the following error:

 
<xs:nml xmlns:xs="http://www.netgear.com/protocol/transaction/NMLSchema-0.9" src="browser" dst="nas" locale="en-us">
<xs:transaction ref-id="" type="0">
<xs:response ref-id="opid" status="failure">
<xs:error>
<xs:error-code>
<![CDATA[ 12008010002 ]]>
</xs:error-code>
<xs:error-cause>
<![CDATA[ Can't create zipped log ]]>
</xs:error-cause>
<xs:error-details>
<![CDATA[ Error in dlowload log ]]>
</xs:error-details>
</xs:error>
</xs:response>
</xs:transaction>
</xs:nml>
 
I've upvoted the idea, of course! I suspected right off the bat that I shouldn't do what it was suggesting and that's why I came here...
Message 3 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

The NAS is generating a lot of logs, I'm attaching an screenshot of it.

 

readynas104-logs.png

 

I tried using SSH to create a dmesg log myself but I couldn't because I got the error "dmesg: write failed: No space left on device"!! My HDDs have plenty of space but of course it's referring to the internal space of the NAS. How could this happen? I have only one app in use, Transmission, but my use of it is very light, occasional. I also use the amazon drive synchronization.

 

So here's the output of dmesg which I got by hand using SSH:

 https://www.dropbox.com/s/6r0swgcexehunok/readynas104-dmesg.log?dl=0

 

Thank you very much for your help!

Message 4 of 14
Marty_M
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Hello sectoid,

 
Please try to download the logs from Raidar softwae utility.
 
Regards,
Marty_M 
NETGEAR Community Team

Message 5 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Unfortunately both RAIDar and ReadyCLOUD can't connect to the NAS. RAIDar shows me all the info, including volumes, and I can click on download logs but it shows "Connecting to ReadyNAS ..." for a bit and then "Download process failed."

 

I can extract anything by SSH, I just need to know the location.

 

I'll admit that I'm starting to worry about, and miss, my data 😞

It's kinda impossible to not get nervous in a situation like this!

 

Thanks for the help.

Message 6 of 14
jak0lantash
Mentor

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade


@sectoid wrote:

I tried using SSH to create a dmesg log myself but I couldn't because I got the error "dmesg: write failed: No space left on device"!! My HDDs have plenty of space but of course it's referring to the internal space of the NAS.


It's not referring to the Flash card but to the OS volume created on the HDDs.

You see, there are three volumes created on the HDDs, the OS, the swap and the data (multiple pieces for data in certain cases).

If it tells you that there is no space left when trying to extract the logs, that would mean that the OS volume is full. Sometimes, this prevents the data volume from being mounted.

 

Can you check with df -h if md0 is full?

If it is, follow these steps: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/RN314-FW-6-7-1-root-partition-full-how-to-fix/m...

Message 7 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Yes it is full. However the biggest directory (3.1Gb) only has personal files (photos and videos) which I can't delete and didn't expect to be in an OS partition... shouldn't it be in the data partition? Why is it there?

 

I didn't do anything yet because I'm not sure if I can safely delete those files. Another question: after I create space, should I reboot the NAS or will it recover the volumes automatically?

Message 8 of 14
StephenB
Guru

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

You might consider using paid support.  

 

If you have a USB drive (or stick) you should be able to copy the 3.1 GB folder to external storage from SSH.  I don't know if the volume will remount when you do a reboot though - that depends on the state of the array, and if there was any damage done when the OS partition ran out of space.

 

 

Message 9 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Thanks for the help guys, after creating empty space and rebooting the volume is back. I was not able to copy it to an external usb drive, though. For some reason it was in /media but ls returned nothing (and there's a lot of data in it, the NAS even runs a nightly backup of some folders to it), and so I decided to not copy them.

 

Now to the new considerations/questions:

  1. I'm still puzzled by how that data ended up in the OS partition. My wife copied those files using a mac using a SAMBA share from the NAS. This specific share is still there, with other data that doesn't show up in the OS partition and thus was not deleted by me. She tried copying those files a few weeks ago and it was always resulting in an error at the middle. However, the NAS continued operating for days after that, and I even copied more data to it. It only "broke" when my son turned it off in the middle of the hdd exchange, so I thought that was the cause, but it probably wasn't.
  2. This external hdd connected via USB had about 7GB of space left. Now it shows 76GB free. However, it suddenly went from 76GB to 9GB weeks ago, then to 7GB when I copied a few things over. I thought it odd at the time but as I was indeed copying a lot of things to the NAS and it backs up a few folders to it automatically, I didn't look into it. Now I think maybe the 9GB reporting was wrong.
  3. I now have 2x4TB hdds and 2x3TB hdds. The RAID 6 array was created with 4x3TB hdds. Is there a way for me to use the 2x1TB remaining space? Can I create a JBOD of 2TB for example?

Thanks again!

 

Message 10 of 14
StephenB
Guru

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

The USB drive has a mount point on the OS partition.  I am thinking that the drive somehow was dismounted while files were being copied. That could possibly result in the data being written to the OS partition mount point.  Something similar happened to another poster (in his case the drive dismounted in the middle of a backup job).

 

It's possible that the new RAID groups configuration would let you use the extra space if you configure the system to flexraid.  That's not something I've tried, since I don't have any systems with disks of unequal size at the moment.

 

 

Message 11 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Hmm, that would be a possibility, but not in this case - the files that went into the OS partition were not copied to the external USB drive nor were they part of the folders that are backed-up to that drive.

 

It'll be a while until I get everything backed-up to a cloud solution, my upload speed is only 1mbps. Until then, I can't go with flex-raid. Isn't there any way to use the extra space while maintaining the raid 6 volume? I like the double parity because my 3TB drives are the seagates with huge failure rates 😞

Message 12 of 14
StephenB
Guru

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

XRAID only supports one volume, and to use all the space with dual redundancy the four largest disks all need to be the same size.

Message 13 of 14
sectoid
Aspirant

Re: RAID 6 inaccessible after hdd upgrade

Ok, thank you very much for the explanation!

Message 14 of 14
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