JonathanM

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/upgrade-instructions/#manual-upgrade-or-downgrade

It should show the list of drives, with them all missing. No harm here. Your plan looks good to me.

Garbled video like that could also be RAM.

In general, binhex's containers are designed and tested in bridge mode, I don't think any other setup is supported. You may be able to force it to work, but you will be swimming upstream.

If you have enough ports without the RAID controller, yes. Otherwise it may be possible to flash the controller to IT mode, some can, some can't. Worst case if you need the ports you should be able to add a compatible controller.

Sorry, I googled around trying to find them for sale and couldn't. I guess my google fu isn't working as well as it usually does.

How is this different than storaxa?

I'm confused. Which is it? LSI controllers AFAIK have either IT mode, where no hardware RAID is possible, or IR mode, where there are different RAID modes exposed, including a pseudo HBA. In order to work seamlessly, they need to have IT firmware flashed. I seem to remember Adaptec cards having their own issues, like randomly deciding to default back to RAID mode and writing extraneous stuff to the drives. @JorgeB is more familiar with the nuances of the different cards, I believe if you post diagnostics here we can tell which card, and even more important, which driver and firmware you are dealing with.

Proper handling of manual edits made to XML. "Proper" can be debated, but silently discarded or reverted is not a solution.

Do you need more devices? If not, no urgency.

If the rebuild completed with no errors, it should be fine. However... Since the rebuild writes to the new drive without verifying that the data can be successfully read, it's possible that the next rebuild could run into errors and fail. So, not necessary, but probably a good idea. Non-correcting parity check is a good way to determine if a subsequent rebuild will be successful.

Placeholder for future implementation.

Make sure you document how to stop the script from running at startup or kill it when desired, as this would make a future technician absolutely batty trying to figure out why the stupid server keeps shutting itself down for no reason. I know you said you made sure it logs the activity, but if there is a network change, or any other circumstance keeps that IP from responding to a ping... You can see where this could be very bad. If it were me, I might go so far as to only do the shutdown if the gateway was unresponsive, AND a canary file was readable with the correct content on one of the array drives. That way if the array isn't started, or that file is deleted, the server will stay running. Maybe name the canary file POWERFAILSHUTDOWN or something, so the next guy intuitively knows it may be involved in an unplanned shutdown.

Once you recover your backup, overwrite the config folder on your working USB with the backup, and do the disable auto start there. Your backup should contain your license file, which can be transferred when you boot up with your backed up config.

Trial version is unlimited AFAIK

Since you can't recover the drive assignments you will need to follow JorgeB's advice.

Look in the config folder. /boot only exists on a running system, it's not on the flash drive. Think of /boot as the windows drive letter like E:\

Doesn't matter much, since you know what drives you want to assign, but you can preserve all to leave the drives in their previous slots while still allowing free reassignment. The preserve options simply determines which slots are completely blanked vs. prefilled. The end result is the same, it's just a matter of convenience.

Tools, new config. Just make sure you don't accidentally assign any drives to the two parity slots.

No, it's a bad controller because it uses a 5 port controller with a multiplier.

Your method should work, but you will need to disable the docker and possibly vm services, not just stop the containers, to ensure there are no files in use while the moves are being done. You will know the service is stopped when there is no docker tab available in the GUI when the array is started. Everything must stay stopped until the new drive is in place with all files back in the same path. You can use the built in mover function, but it would probably be much faster to use the Dynamix File Manager plugin to copy all the files to your temporary location on the array. I would copy rather than move, that way you have a full backup.

super.dat I think that file is the only non-text config file, you can't open it in a text editor and get readable content.

Sorry, apparently I looked at the wrong link. you are correct, it has enough expansion to make it minimally viable.

This was already resolved by the OP, the correct license hadn't yet been downloaded to the USB stick.

That is completely wrong. Write destinations are governed by share settings, nothing to do with speed.