Unraid Disk Shown as “New Device” When Its Full of Data

While working on setting up my new hardware and bringing my unraid pool back online on it, I encountered an odd problem that made me sweat. I started my array and immediately it gave an error that the cache drive failed. This was odd since that drive was fine just before I started installing the new hardware, so what changed now. I stopped the array and looked, and it was no longer assigned as the cache drive. When I went and added it to the cache again, unraid claimed it was a “new drive” and would be wiped when the array was started.

This was very wrong, this wasn’t a new cache drive, it was the same one as before. It also has a large amount of data on it that I’d like to keep, and docker settings. So I had to figure out how to tell unraid that the drive was fine and to just use it.

I found out that this was one of the situations the “new config” option was added to the tools for. So I went to tools -> new config and applied it while saving the disk locations in the pool. I double checked them after applying the new config, went to the main page, and checked the box stating that the parity should be assumed correct. After starting the array, everything was in order again. All my containers started, data was all there, and everything was back working again.

Using Qemu Tools

While moving virtual machines from my unraid NAS to my new proxmox node way back when, I ended up needing to use a few of the qemu-img tools. This is a toolset for handling virtual disks used by kvm/qemu.

Conversions

Something I hadn’t realized while using unraid as my kvm host was that it wasn’t always using qcow2 format, which was my go to format, despite that the webui saying that the file format was qcow2. There were also a few virtual machines I made that ended up in different forms, so to handle these, I ended up having to convert the machines using the following commands.

The first command is to convert from a raw image to a qcow2 file.

qemu-img convert -f raw - O qcow2 /path/to/file.img

The second command is to convert from a qcow to a qcow2 file.

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O qcow2 /path/to/img.qcow

File Information

The other command I made use of was the info command from the qemu-img tool. This gives out useful file information for the file input to the command.

qemu-img info

These are just some useful, small commands in the qemu toolbox that can help significantly when working with the VM disk files directly.

Using ntfy.sh to send unRAID notifications

unRAID supports multiple notification platforms for keeping you informed about what the server is doing, the only problem is, I don’t use any of those notification platforms. I have however started using ntfy.sh, which has been working well for my home assistant notifications, and is a very simple platform. What I’d like to do is integrate it into unRAID so that I can make use of it there as well.

Continue reading “Using ntfy.sh to send unRAID notifications”