disParity » Bug Reports

0.35 - Initial parity build empty drive problem

(5 posts)
  1. freehand
    Member

    I had a couple issues upgrading from 0.21 to 0.35.

    I did the following:

    - Imported my old config which seemed to work fine. I did not try running an update.
    - I was replacing my parity drive with a larger one so I changed the parity path to the new drive.
    - I added my old parity drive to the pool as I will eventually use it for data now. All my drives are added using a sub folder called "Protected" so this folder was empty on this new drive and had no updates or deletes. I still had my old parity data outside of the protected folder just in-case the rebuild went wrong. My plan is to delete it once the rebuild is complete.
    - Clicked "Update All" and it starting running. Only the first drive's progress bar was moving which was I thought was strange but I let it run anyway. 12 hours later it was finished the first drive and working on the next drive but I noticed it was re-writing each parity file again! I could see the date modified of the first parity file (parity0.dat) was changed 10 hours after I started the update.
    - I cancelled the update because it was going to take days at this point. I tried restarting the program, running the update again, reconfiguring the setting but nothing helped. It always seemed to run on a single drive.
    - Next I clicked reset and tried again but it kept getting an error saying files0.dat did not exist.
    - I eventually removed my old parity drive (which was empty, 0 files) from the pool and tried resetting it again, then updating it seems to be working. All drives have progress bars and it is currently building a new parity set.

    I will let you know if it works once it is complete. It seems there might be a bug with a drive that has either has no files on it or a drive that is "Up to date" when rebuilding your parity data. Not sure which one it is.

    Posted 2 years ago #
  2. Roland
    Roland

    Oof, that's a complicated series of steps, at any one of which something could have gone wrong, causing everything after that to mess up. I don't think it had anything to do with a drive being empty per se.

    Without seeing your log file, it *sounds* like what happened is that somewhere in the upgrade and/or drive switching, disParity's notion of which data drive was which got mixed up. Say for example drive A and B got switched somehow. When you did the update all, it would find all the files on drive A gone and replaced with a new set of files (the files from drive B.) The same would happen for drive B. It would be neat if disParity could detect this situation automatically, but it's not easy.

    Anyway, an update is processed like this: for all drives that have deletes, first all files from drive A are removed, then drive B, etc. Once it's all done with deletes, it goes back to process the adds from each drive in sequence. So your description of it spending hours just processing one drive would be consistent with disParity thinking that every file on that drive had been removed. You would also see the same parity files changing more than once in this scenario.

    Not sure about the error about the missing files0.dat, though. Did that error appear immediately when you pressed "Reset", or at some other point after that?

    Posted 2 years ago #
  3. freehand
    Member

    Strange. I don't think it thought files were deleted as all drives said they had zero deletes. I only added a single empty drive and didn't change any of the existing ones. The error about the missing files0.dat was when I clicked "Update All" after I had clicked reset.

    All seems well now after the full update. For future reference what is the proper procedure for starting over and creating a new parity set?

    Posted 2 years ago #
  4. Roland
    Roland

    If you just want to recreate your parity from scratch using the same data drives as before, hit the Reset button followed by Update All.

    If you want to start over from scratch with a different set of drives, hit "Reset", then remove the old drives you don't want (Right-click on each drive and select Remove), then add your new drives and hit Update All.

    Posted 2 years ago #
  5. Roland
    Roland

    By the way, you were right about the empty drive causing an issue, there was a bug there after all. Should be fixed in version 0.37.

    Posted 2 years ago #

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