thanks. finally got around to it today. I took out the controller cards and plugged all the drives directly into the motherboard. startup errors went away.
it's rebuilding parity now. was afraid i was going to lose my data, but your advice and spaceinvader video on xfs corruption saved my butt <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVjB0ROdLBA> wife is SO happy about your unraid hobby.
also my docker was hanging my whole system, deleted the docker.img and just reinstalled, nice that the app data is separate, so all my plex data is unchanged!!
unraid is so powerful, but also so complicated for average nubes. it's a long learning curve at times for sures. thanks teeteejorge for all the work that you and others do on this forum. unraid's also a pathway to linux learning and learning to program in python for me. what a rabbit hole!!