# Is a node with no STARTED partitions always safe to wipe out and restart?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-a-node-with-no-started-partitions-always-safe-to-wipe-out-and-restart/20071>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [October 3, 2014, 8:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-a-node-with-no-started-partitions-always-safe-to-wipe-out-and-restart/20071 "2014-10-03T20:17:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Marcelo\_Rinesi](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/marcelo_rinesi/32/1233_2.png) [@Marcelo\_Rinesi](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Marcelo_Rinesi)\
**Post date:** [October 3, 2014, 8:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-a-node-with-no-started-partitions-always-safe-to-wipe-out-and-restart/20071/1 "2014-10-03T20:17:06Z")

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Hi.

I had disk space issues in a couple of the nodes of a 3-node, 5-shard,  
1-replica cluster, and now all the shards are yellow, with the shard  
distribution looking like this:

$ curl 127.0.0.1:9200/\_cat/shards |grep my\_index | sort -k4

my\_index 2 r INITIALIZING 10... Dust  
my\_index 3 r INITIALIZING 10... Dust  
my\_index 0 r INITIALIZING 10... Nebulon  
my\_index 4 r INITIALIZING 10... Nebulon  
my\_index 1 r INITIALIZING 10... Letha  
my\_index 1 p STARTED 1198093674 187.9gb 10... Nebulon  
my\_index 3 p STARTED 1354081141 232.1gb 10... Letha  
my\_index 2 p STARTED 1833312409 315.4gb 10... Letha  
my\_index 4 p STARTED 337613525 47.3gb 10... Letha  
my\_index 0 p STARTED 714336880 119gb 10... Letha

As you can see, Letha is carrying most of the weight, with one STARTED  
shard in Nebulon and none in Dust. The replicas seem to have been  
corrupted. My question is: is it always safe in this situation to shut down  
Dust, wipe out its data directories, and restart it? I.e., can I be  
reasonably sure that there won't be any data loss? And if so, can I do it  
while still indexing documents, or do I need to shut down indexing in the  
meanwhile?

Thanks in advance,  
Marcelo

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 12:58am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-a-node-with-no-started-partitions-always-safe-to-wipe-out-and-restart/20071/2 "2017-07-06T00:58:20Z")

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Closed on July 6, 2017, 12:58am UTC