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Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

Tarv
Aspirant

Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

Have a ReadyNas Pro 6 with a 6 disk X-RAID2 array.

Disks 2 and 3 started reporting reallocated sectors a few days apart, and shortly after started reporting uncorrectable errors. I tried to replace disk 3 first as that one was reporting way worse. During the rebuild at about 80%, disk 2 fails completely and sync fails. When I reboot, everything comes back up and the sync process starts again at 0%.

Q) Can I power down, pull out disk 2 and try to clone this drive to using something like Acronis? If I successfully image the drive to another new drive, will the ReadyNAS see it as a part of the same array? Old drive is a Segeate, new drive is a WD Red. I obviously can't risk switching disk 2 if it tries to rebuild it.

I tried putting back the original disk 3, hoping it would put it back into the array and let me try syncing disk 2, but it treats it as a new drive already.

I can still pull the data off the drive (started to already), but finding 10TB of space to move everything off this to will be tough.
Message 1 of 6
StephenB
Guru

Re: Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

NEVER insert a drive into a running NAS unless you want it to treat it as new. If you want to try recovery then you need to power down and then insert.

You can clone with any cloning software that supports sector by sector copies (and is not looking at the file system). The main difference is how well they handle bad sectors (since of course you have them).

The issue with cloning is that some of the sectors will have missing/garbled data, and there is no way for RAID to detect and repair that damage.

The best solution is to find the 10 TB of space, and backup. After that I'd delete and copy back the data, just to make sure the array is fully consistent. Probably simplest to rebuild the full NAS, but deleting/recreating each share would also work.

Have you been running periodic maintenance checks (Scrubs and file system integrity)? That's a useful feature in 4.2.x firmware, and possibly could have found the errors sooner.
Message 2 of 6
Tarv
Aspirant

Re: Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

Thanks for the reply. The part about the RAID keeping my data in check while it finds bad sectors was all the info I needed.

I'll move everything off the NAS and rebuild.

Thanks!
Message 3 of 6
Tarv
Aspirant

Re: Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

When the data is off the drive, do I just pull the two dead drives and put in two new ones? Will it let me just re-create the volume and shares as new from there?

Almost have all the data off...
Message 4 of 6
StephenB
Guru

Re: Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

You can't swap out two dead drives at once. Even replacing one at a time will likely cause problems. Your best strategy is to do a fresh factory install with the new drives in place.

Basically the process is
(a) back up the configuration and save the data. Note any add-ons you have installed.
(b) do a factory reset on the NAS using the boot menu
(c) reinstall the add-ons
(d) restore the configuration
(e) restore the data.

You need to do (c) before (d).
Message 5 of 6
Tarv
Aspirant

Re: Two disks failed in array, will Acronis clone work?

Worked great! Users, shares and addons all look good.

Now to put the data back...

Thanks again.
Message 6 of 6
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