iAmTheTot

So, I believe my old USB was cooked and it had enabled an on-device read-only mode to protect its data from corruption (pretty handy, so I had fully up-to-date config to draw from rather than relying on a few weeks old backup). I transferred to a new USB and all is well and booting correctly. So for anyone in the future, check to see if your USB is read-only.

For anyone in the future who stumbles on this, I just wanted to update my findings. Thanks to trurl's suggestion, I tried another USB drive and was able to boot into Unraid. Huzzah, doesn't look like it's any of the expensive parts of my server lol. After confirming it could boot into a fresh install of Unraid, I replaced the config folder with my old USB's config and tried to boot again. Worked again! So nothing borked with the config either. Next I took the old USB and tried to reformat it and reinstall Unraid. Gparted was giving me trouble here, telling me that it was read-only. A quick search suggests that this could indeed be a USB problem. I'm going to try a few things to try and fix it but I may just need to switch to a new USB!

Nevermind on this bit, I see now you can switch to EOL to reveal past versions!

Thank you very much for the quick response! I will hook up monitor to, heh, monitor it. My unraid was 7.1.4 and it looks like that version is no longer downloadable for install, is that correct?

Some slight background: I have a painfully small cache drive at 250 GBs. My partner was transferring a lot of files to a share that uses the cache and I noticed it right as the cache was nearly full. I asked her to stop the transfer momentarily so that I could at least run the mover. However, the clicking the mover button did nothing. The web portal was still otherwise responsive, allowing me to navigate to other tabs and click other options, etc. However clicking Move did nothing. I opened the logs and noticed that it was spitting out a constant stream of a curl error, and when I pressed Move it gave an error about not being able to connect to a socket. Regretfully, I did not save the errors so I do not recall the exact wording. Perhaps foolishly, I thought I would just try rebooting the system. I also hadn't cleaned out the inside of the chassis in a while, so I took the opportunity to do a shutdown via the web portal, blew out the inside of the chassis, put everything back as I have done many times, and turned it back on. My worst fears came true as the dreaded 3-5 minute wait for the web portal to become available stretched in to 10 minutes, 15, and finally gave up at 20 minutes. I tried moving the USB to a new port on the back of the motherboard, but did not change outcome. As far as I can tell, Unraid is not even completing boot at all, as it does not show up on my router at any point. I removed the USB and mounted it on my desktop PC. I was able to access the USB and, even though I also perform regular backups of the USB drive with Appdata Backup, I took the opportunity to archive the USB's contents as it currently is anyway. I then performed a badblocks read-only inspection of the drive which detected no bad blocks. This actually slightly concerned me as now I'm wondering if it's other hardware failure inside the chassis. My MOBO does have an LED debug indicator which completes its usual cycle, although it does hang for a while on the BOOT LED it eventually clears and then the system just sits there, fans spinning happily, until I hard shut down. I have not yet connected a monitor to the system during boot up primarily because it's going to be quite a hassle, but that is an option for me if it's a good next step. I also considered installing Unraid on another USB to test if that will boot instead. Questions: Can I simply copy/paste the contents of the current USB, or the contents of one of my backups from Appdata Backup, onto another USB and simply try to boot from that or are there other steps involved? Will I potentially be able to acquire useful data by connecting a monitor? Is there anywhere on the USB that indicates which hdd was which in the array? I know which one was parity and cache 100%, but I am not sure the order of the other drives in the array. disk.cfg seems the closest thing but I'm not sure the info contained within is actually useful for identification of a drive. I know that my description of the errors encountered before shutdown are incomplete, but does it seem like they could be related to this issue? Are there specific next steps I should take? I have off-site backups of everything truly important, but would really like to avoid any data and config loss if possible.