home server

[RobertKH]

Sounds good. I'll give it a shot as soon as I get home from work. Thanks for your help darkod

[RobertKH]

Should it take this long to boot normally? It has been about 10-15 minutes waiting for it to boot after I modified the /etc/fstab

[RobertKH]

I screwed something up. Lol. I went ahead before reading not to try to format a drive, but only the array. I went through and deleted the array and even removed mdadm however now I have some lost and found files that I can't even get rid of with nautilus. Any ideas? I was able to rebuild the array, but still have that folder on the drive. How can I get rid of it?

[darkod]

I think that is just a folder created on any partition. Since you made ext4 partition, it shows it now.

Since you are making the raid all over, I suggest to remake the partitions you formatted. Just make them with parted at the command line because parted only creates partitions, not a filesystem. Or if you are using Gparted for the GUI, I assume you need to create the partition as RAW or something similar. I've never tried to create a partition without a format in Gparted, I use parted mainly since it does that by default.

After you have the partitions without any filesystem again, make a new array.

[RobertKH]

By raw do you mean unallocated? I formatted both drives with new partitions, but for some reason I kept getting an error on /dev/sda1 but not on /dev/sdd1. I'll post some screenshots later when I get home. For now, can you tell me how to erase and create a partition using cli? I don't know how to do that, only through the GUI. thanks

[RobertKH]

I also keep getting an error when running gparted. "Could not stat /dev/md/0" I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

[darkod]

No, by RAW I mean creating a partition but without any filesystem on it. In Gparted when you create a partition and select the Use As to be ext4, it creates it as ext4 directly. There should be option to create a partition but now a filesystem.

Unallocated space is usually space that doesn't belong to any partition, it's not the same. For mdadm you actually need a partition, but no filesystem on it.

The basic commands to use parted in CLI are:
Open a disk with parted:
sudo parted /dev/sda

Once oyu are in the parted> prompt, to print table:
print

To delete partition:
rm <number>

To create partition:
mkpart primary/logical <start> <end> (for msdos partitions, the start/end depend on the unit type set)
mkpart <label> <start> <end> (for gpt partitions, you must enter a label, and gpt partition do not have difference between primary/logical)

To set unit size:
unit <unit> (for example I most commonly use MiB which is MibiByte 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, while 1 MB = 1000 KB)

To write new blank msdos or gpt table:
mklabel msdos/gpt

To set a flag on or off:
set <partition-number> <flag-name> on/off (for example, set 2 raid on)

To exit the parted prompt:
quit

be very careful with parted, since the changes are done immediately. It's not like Gparted that waits until you hit the green button. Gparted is actually just a GUI front of parted.

The mkpart command makes only partitions, no filesystem, which is very useful when you want to create a partition for raid without any filesystem. The unit command is also useful since it allows you to work with exact units, and set the start/end points of a partition exactly as you want.

To format a partition/array later in CLI with ext4 for example, you could use something like:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0
etc

[RobertKH]

Thanks for the quick reply. This will be super useful. I'll try it as soon as I get home.

[darkod]

I also keep getting an error when running gparted. "Could not stat /dev/md/0" I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

It looks like it's trying to read md0 but it can't, maybe because you deleted the partitions. Did you stop the array before that? Don't forget, now that you have an array running, to manipulate the underlying partitions you better stop it first:
sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md0

But with deleting the partitions the info about md0 is gone, there might be traces left in mdadm though. There was a command in mdadm to delete an array I think. You can look for it. The cat /proc/mdstat will tell you the current mdadm status.

[darkod]

One more thing, the print command in parted lists the filesystems on all partitions when it outputs the list. If you are after a partition with no filesystem, after you create it the printed list should have no filesystem specified in the Filesystem column. That's how you know if it has a filesystem or not on it.