New Unraid installation won't format disk


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I am new to Unraid and set up my hardware and OS. I pre-cleared both my parity and data drive. I then followed the instructions on the Unraid Getting Started page(s) as to how start everything and  assign disks, and as I recall the admin UI indicated it was formatting or something like that.  When all that was done, i got error messages from various sources, which seem to all be about this particular issue:

 

disk1 (ST10000VN0004-1ZD101_ZA21QC5B) has file system errors (No file system (32))

Some instructions in Unraid (I don't remember where) indicated I should hibernate it, and Format button would appear next to the disk, or something like that.  However, I can't find a button to format the drives anywhere. 

 

What am I doing wrong?  Why isn't there some obvious way to prepare and format a drive?  I need to get this Unraid working as soon as poisble.

 

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

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- Stop the Array

- select the disk

- change the format to XFT, press apply then done

- go back to the "main" tab

- in the "Array Operation" you will see a "format" button. it will automatically list the disk in need of the format.

 

I have followed the above steps and found that it does not always work. it could be a matter of me not waiting long enough but I can say for certain that the format button is not always there.

 

I'm sorry but OP is right. I am a noob and I love unRaid but I do find that I have to dig/click around far to much for simple things. The interface is not as intuitive as one would think. You get used to it after using the OS for a short period of time. unRaid is not one of those things that you can "fire-up" and figure out... but it's not due to your lack of knowledge, it's because things are burred in the interface.

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7 minutes ago, smaka510 said:

I have followed the above steps and found that it does not always work. it could be a matter of me not waiting long enough but I can say for certain that the format button is not always there.

 

Do not use the 'back' button of your browser but always use the 'Done' button in the GUI. This ensures the display is always up-to-date.

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8 hours ago, bonienl said:

 

Do not use the 'back' button of your browser but always use the 'Done' button in the GUI. This ensures the display is always up-to-date.

 

Yes I am aware of this. I never use the back button.

OP is still right. The format button does not always appear. I just added 3 more drives to my array last night and had the same problem.

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1 hour ago, smaka510 said:

 

Yes I am aware of this. I never use the back button.

OP is still right. The format button does not always appear. I just added 3 more drives to my array last night and had the same problem.

 

When you add new disks, the first thing unRAID will do is CLEAR. Once the new disks are cleared (zeroed) then a FORMAT is presented.

 

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3 hours ago, bonienl said:

 

When you add new disks, the first thing unRAID will do is CLEAR. Once the new disks are cleared (zeroed) then a FORMAT is presented.

 

 

So it is a matter of waiting then? Sounds like I was jumping the gun. Is there some sort of progress bar or status shown anywhere?

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  • 1 month later...

I figured it out

You have to set the number of cache disks to "1". Simply removing the other disks until there is only 1 is not enough. AFTER you do this the option to change the drive to another format becomes available. The next time you start the array you will see the "format" button. Maybe this is made crystal clear somewhere, but I never found it.

 

leaving this info for the next person

Edited by smaka510
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On 12/11/2017 at 11:39 PM, johnnie.black said:

You never mentioned you're trying to format a cache disk since you used an existing thread about formatting array disks, cache pool with 2 or more devices can only be btrfs so there's no option to change filesystem.

 

at the time I had no reason to think the process would be different for a cache disk

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