Elmojo

It wasn't bad until I started this move about an hour ago. I run parity checks once a month, and have never had a single error. And no, I was replacing parity1, since it forced me to make that the largest one.

tower-diagnostics-20260102-2046.zip Here you go, have a gander and see what looks hokey to you... Oh, and thanks for your time with this!

That's sort of why I was asking if you thought I should stop the rebuild.

That's sort of where I'm headed now, unless you say something that changes my mind in the next few minutes. :) It says it'll take about 9hrs to rebuild the parity, and it's finding errors, which I call BS on, because my parity has been perfect for years. There's no reason for it to go sketchy now. I assumed it was better protection. Is it not? It lets up to 2 drives fail without data loss, right?

Oh, I see. Not use the old disks at all. If I do that, would I need to let this parity rebuild finish, or stop it, do the New Config, build the new array, and let it basically start over with just the new drives?

Understood. That's fine at this point. All my data is on the old array, so I'll just take the loss of those many hours I spent duplicating that data. ;) I don't understand what that means... There's nothing on the new (6TB) drives that doesn't already exist on the old (4TB) drives. Can you explain how that New Config process would help me?

yes, copied Sorry, I must have used the wrong term. That's what I meant, replacing partity1 (4TB) with a larger drive, so it will then let me expand the array with the other 6TB drives. The current (old) array is 6x4TB data drives + 2x4TB parity. The contents is...everything. lol It's media, work projects, photos, containers, etc... The new array was planned to be 4x6TB data drives + 2x 6TB parity. At the moment, I've dropped 1 of the 6TB drives into parity slot 1, and it's rebuilding. When that is done, I'll add the other 5x 6TB drives to the array. That will result in... a mess. lol I got overwhelmed. I asked for help, and got a bunch of jargon I didn't understand. I read a bunch of articles and watched a few videos and basically confused myself more. I finally said, screw this, I can at least copy over my data and start fresh. However, I underestimated what a huge pain in the butt it is to set up a server from scratch, when you've already spent the better part of 3 years getting one tuned just right. So I figured, hey, this thing is supposed to run on any hardware, so let's jist swap it over to the new T640... and here we are. :/

Do you think that reset is a better approach than just doing a parity swap to one of the larger drives, then after that finishes its rebuild, adding the new larger drives to the array? I'm thinking about just leaving the older drives in place for now. I have an 18-bay chassis, might as well use it. ;)

So I found the documentation for adding drives to an existing array. It says that my parity disk(s) must be equal or larger than my largest data disk. Does that mean I need to use my larger disks as parity? Can I have mixed-size parity disks? For example, right now I have 2x 4TB parity drives. Can I add 1x 6TB drive, or do all the parity disks need to be the same size? Because my original plan was to keep the original array (and entire server) in service as a parallel backup. That has since gone out the window for...reasons. You're speaking way over my head right now. Can you dumb that down for someone who's had a really rough week, and also barely understands any of this on a good day? lol

Yes, I do. I sort of fixed it. I changed the boot type on the new server from UEFI to BIOS, and now the system boots normally into unRAID. This seems to be what it wanted, so I'm not complaining. :) I asked that earlier, but I guess no one saw it. At this point, I'm not sure what to do... I have the old array available, and a bunch of new, larger disks that show up as unassigned. I was planning to replace the old drives with these newer ones, but my plan of moving all the data to the new drives (already done), then using them to build a new array on the old config isn't working. At this point, if I can just add the new disks to the existing array, and wipe all that redundant data, I'll be happy. Any suggestions on the best way to do that? I have an option to [mount] 4 of the 5 new drives, but one is grayed out for some reason. Is that indicating a problem with that drive? I can't seem to find the instructions for adding drives to an existing array. My brain is addled after the day I've had. :( I'd also like to designate one of the new drives as an additional parity.

I know it boots with a different flash drive, because I was running a trial on it (the new server) previously, until I decided to just swap everything over from the old one and go that route. EDIT: Confirmed. I just put the "testing" flash drive (trial license) back into the new server, and it boots fine. There's something about the config of the flash drive from the old server that isn't playing nice on the new server. This isn't supposed to be a thing, since unRAID claims to be 'hardware agnostic', and says it will run on almost anything. Now, the first time I try to do a (seemingly) simple migration, it crashes and burns. :/ I'm a bit frustrated, and the wife is getting impatient about the server being down. I find this ironic, since she didn't want the thing to begin with... lol

Booting with flash drive in other ports (tried 2) makes no difference, it still fails with the same error. I swapped the flash back to the old server, and it booted to the GUI/Launch screen. I stopped it there, since none of the other hardware was present. What else can I try? The new server (T640) is set to UEFI boot, is that correct? I can't recall what the old one is set to, and it's a major hassle to check.

That would be a mess, since I'd have to swap back over all the old hardware, right?

So I'm migrating from a Dell T630 to a T640. I've swapped my hardware, and the flash drive from the T630 to the T640. When I boot the T640, I get the image below. I think the machine is trying to boot from the USB, or at least it says it is, but it says there's no OS detected. What step did I miss?

What do you mean by 'external problem'? What would that look like? A bad switch, bad cable, that sort of thing? I'm also getting kicked out of RDS sessions from my desktop, if that means anything...

tower-diagnostics-20251209-0913.zip I did a little more poking around last night, and discovered that I can usually (but not always) access my containers over my LAN, if they typically have their own GUIs or interface. I can also access the services hosted by my VMs, just as the webUI for my Blue Iris camera server. It really seems to be mostly and issue with accessing shares via Windows Explorer on my desktop and my wife's desktop. This applies to browsed folders and mapped drives alike. EDIT: I just noticed that my VMs are also having trouble accessing the shares. One of my VMs runs a torrent client that shares Linux ISOs. It was reporting "error: invalid file path" on a couple of the images this morning, when I know nothing has changed on the paths, and the files are all right where they have always been.

So I was running 6.12 for a long time, with no problems. I hadn't really felt the need to upgrade to 7.x, but recently some of my dockers and plugins reported that they were "incompatible" so I figured it was time. I ran the update, and things seemed to be okay, except that now I'm getting connection errors left and right. Sometimes (like right now), I can't even access the webGUI for the server! If I wait a couple minutes, it will come back on like nothing happened, until it fails again a few minutes (or an hour) later. I have mapped drives that I can't access (sometimes), and my automated app to backup from my PC to the server (FreeFileSync), often fails with some sort of "networkpathnotfound" error. Oddly, I can access my VMs, but they are having connection issues are well. Is this a known thing with 7.x? If so, how can I fix it?

I'm sorry, I don't follow. Are you saying that somehow all my configs may be broken in the same way? I guess if it's something in the underlying way that unraid is handling VMs, then it could be affecting all of them the same. I'll try setting up a fresh one when I get a chance and see if it behaves the same or not.

Well...good? lol It's happening to me, though, so now I need to figure out why. Hopefully someone will come along who has some ideas of what to check. Thanks for your input. 👍

I could, and I may do that, but I've checked my other VMs, and they appear to be doing the same thing. For example, I have another Win10 VM that runs my BlueIris security cameras. When I close out the RDS session on that one, it closes the BlueIris GUI, but the actual program runs as a system service, so it stays operative. This is what I would expect from a machine that is logging out when "unattended". Each time I connect to that VM via RDS, I have to launch the BlueIris GUI again. This seems to indicate that it's something up with unraid in general, and not specific to that config, since those two VMs were created at different times, and don't share the same general template.

So I have a couple VMs that I use mostly for testing various systems and such. One especially I use a lot as a sandbox for stuff I don't trust. It's a Win10 Pro instance. I connect to it via RDS. What's odd is that every time I connect to it, it acts like it's booting up or logging in fresh. What I mean is that I see apps and services starting up, like they weren't running. For example, my VPN app launches and connects, grabbing a new port number sometimes. This messes up my torrent client, which I use for sharing and downloading Linux ISOs. I have to manually go into the settings and put in the new port. My point is... is this normal behavior? How can I keep the VM running "in the background" while I'm not logged into it? It has services that I'd like to keep active, such as the torrent client (for uploads) and VPN, among other things. It also takes a while for everything to wake up and reconnect, when this doesn't seem necessary.

Yes, assuming that you're running DVDFab in the VM. Not unless Plex is also running within that same VM.

That's why I don't suggest binding VFIOs, it's not necessary in most situations, and can cause issues, especially on newer equipment, like yours.

First off, @dopeytree , this is a great guide, very concise! Thanks for sharing it with us. I just want to clarify and update few things, since it's been a couple years, and I'm sure folks are still searching for this now and then (I was!). Here are the original instructions, with a few notes/edits, to make it even easier! GPU passthough is much easier than made out. You don't need to do any of the stuff in videos.. Set up the VM with software VNC. Load the VM. Click to open VNC in web browser. Install windows etc. Set up windows user. Close VM. Then Go to top menu choose unraid -> tool system -> devices (This might say - In top navigation bar: select Tools > System Devices. Under PCI Devices and IOMMU Groups) scroll down and tick the NVIDIA GPU or AMD GPU & its soundcard. (scroll to bottom of section and click [Bind Selected to VFIO at Boot] ONLY if you plan to use your GPU with both VMs and Docker containers. If you are only using it for VMs, this step is not required) Reboot unraid. ***NOTE: If you don't bind to the VFIO, there's no point in checking the boxes, and you might at as well skip this step, and save yourself a reboot. ;) Edit VM. Add 2nd graphics card choose your AMD or Nvidia device. (It's the small [+] at the lower left of the Graphics Card section when you're in Edit mode for the VM. Note that the VM must be stopped to make edits. duh.) Add sound card choose your AMD or Nvidia device. (same as for the GPU) Apply. Start VM. It should automatically install basic drivers for the card. Now go to amd or nvidia websites and download the drivers for your card. Run the installer for your card. Reboot VM. Now you have a gaming VM. Enjoy. Thanks again to @dopeytree for the awesome write-up! It got me from zero to pass-thru with very little fuss. Now I just have to figure out how to get decent performance over an RDP connection... ;)

Oh man, that's awesome. Consider it stolen. :)