Upgrading hard drives, new drive is "Inactive"

[orion]

The "mdstat" shows your RAID5 volume missing sda4 in degraded mode. It's hard to guess what's the problem without "dmesg".
Anyway, it occurs to me that there might be some partitions in your slot-2 HDD. Those partitions might cause raid engine to skip this HDD. You can try to remove all of partitions of this HDD in your PC environment.

PS: You can remove slot-2 HDD, then reboot NAS (do AC off, then on). After NAS is ready, put your HDD back to slot-2. Then you should be able to ssh into NAS to get "dmesg".

[mdof2]

Thanks Orion. Would it not kill anything/everything on a new drive to start the synchronization process on the second and or subsequent drives? I'm nearly certain there wasn't anything on the drive as it was fresh from the vendor, then plugged in to run a CHKDSK scan before putting it in the NAS. No partitions, formatting, etc.

I beat my head against the wall for a few hours trying to simply get the NAS to boot up with the original drives in their original locations. Which, after about an hour of the green flashing light it finally became responsive again. It is now rebuilding drive 1. (which, I'm not sure why as that completed synchronizing earlier) So I'm not sure the current 'dmesg' at this point would be of any value.

Even more challenging at this point is getting timely support from Asustor. I have a few messages pending with them, so I'll patiently wait for business hours to open in Taiwan, nad hope my trouble ticket gets a few clock cycles.

Again, I appreciate your help and replies. If I get to the point where it's stalled again, and I can get a dmesg output for you, I certainly will. I am however considering a different RAID path at this point considering the headache this has been thus far.

Cheers-

[orion]

Thanks Orion. Would it not kill anything/everything on a new drive to start the synchronization process on the second and or subsequent drives? I'm nearly certain there wasn't anything on the drive as it was fresh from the vendor, then plugged in to run a CHKDSK scan before putting it in the NAS. No partitions, formatting, etc.

I beat my head against the wall for a few hours trying to simply get the NAS to boot up with the original drives in their original locations. Which, after about an hour of the green flashing light it finally became responsive again. It is now rebuilding drive 1. (which, I'm not sure why as that completed synchronizing earlier) So I'm not sure the current 'dmesg' at this point would be of any value.

Even more challenging at this point is getting timely support from Asustor. I have a few messages pending with them, so I'll patiently wait for business hours to open in Taiwan, nad hope my trouble ticket gets a few clock cycles.

Again, I appreciate your help and replies. If I get to the point where it's stalled again, and I can get a dmesg output for you, I certainly will. I am however considering a different RAID path at this point considering the headache this has been thus far.

Cheers-

It's no harm if you removed slot-2 HDD. However it's based on that there are no any bad sectors on your other drives (6TB, 3TB and 3TB). You did synchronization several times, so those 3 disks should be fine.

Anyway, as I said, the best way is to get asustor support guy involved. I'm quite all right.

[mdof2]

Anyway, as I said, the best way is to get asustor support guy involved.

Going into day 3 of waiting for a reply from Asustor Support.

[mdof2]

As a follow up considering there were a few other threads on this topic with no solution or update.....

After 6 days of waiting for a reply for Asustor Support, I gave up and ended going back to my original HDD's to get it back and running which then allowed me to back that array up to another source. Once everything was backed up, I started from scratch and built the new array, then slowly rebuilt the NAS with users, data, databases, etc. It's was a painful process. to say the least and by far my last choice, but seemed my only option considering the support from Asustor.

So, if you have this issue.... good luck!

[adrianjansen]

Pity I didnt find your posts before I attempted to do exactly the same thing, with exactly the same results. Except I now cannot even boot off the original 2 3 Tb drives.

I had copied most of the critical data over to another volume in the NAS, but that wont boot either. One might have hoped that with 3 disks all showing 'healthy' after sync that one might boot.

My story so far:
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9505

Waiting for response from support.....

[mdof2]

Good luck to you. I never heard back from support, nor was I able to ascertain what the issue was in why my array wouldn't rebuild. Still a mystery.
Support from Asustor was incredibly disappointing on the matter as a whole.

[adrianjansen]

Thanks for that. If I get any useful stuff out of support, I will let you know. At least I had an acknowledgement last night.

[adrianjansen]

Dont know if you ever got this sorted, but I had much the same problem.
See my post on viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9505
Got excellent tech support from Asustor, the guy managed to recover 2 drives of data I could really not afford to lose - my bad for not backing them up regularly !
But while I found their support is excellent, a bit more documentation on what pitfalls to avoid would be good.