trurl

You have replied to a thread that is marked Solved, is 7.5 years old, and for a very old and obsolete version of Unraid. Unlikely that doing it again would have any effect.

Did you read the docs linked in the first post of this thread?

Check cables and connections including plugs and ports.

Usual recommendation is to not overclock servers.

In case that is the actual point of your question, there are 3 settings for each user share which control which disk Unraid will choose for writing new files to the User Share. These are Allocation Method, Split Level, and Minimum Free. If you post your diagnostics it would probably save us some time asking a lot of questions and we could get into the details of how to use these settings. Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete diagnostics zip file to your NEXT post.

According to those diagnostics you are running the current version of CA. Is it telling you there is a newer version?

Using them as Unassigned Devices is OK, and the usual way to use USB connections with your server. Of course, they won't be in User Shares that way so it is a little more trouble to use them for some things, but they will give some temporary capacity if you really need it.

Not really following you there. I also don't recommend USB disks in the cache pool if that's what you mean. Dropped disks there are bad too. You don't have to "preclear" any disks. The only purpose of preclear these days is to test a disk, and perhaps burn it in a little to get it past "infant mortality". Unraid will clear a disk if it isn't already clear when you add it to a new slot in the array. Much older versions of Unraid this clearing took the array offline until it was done, so preclear was invented to clear a disk before (pre) adding it to the array. And Unraid only requires a clear disk when adding it to a new slot in the array. It is not needed when replacing a disk, whether for failure or simply for upsizing, since the entire disk will be overwritten anyway. Clearing a disk is strictly for the purpose of keeping parity valid when adding a disk to a new slot, since a disk that is all zeros has no effect on parity. As I said before, you can test a disk using the manufacturer's software. As for burning it in, some do and some don't. It is probably less risk to simply use a new disk with SATA than to try to use it with USB simply because you have not had time to preclear it.

And it is possible that Unraid won't recognize the disks after they are shucked. It is even possible that they won't mount due to the way some USB enclosure interface to the disks.

Depends on whether you are lucky and the USB connections don't get dropped. If they do, then your whole array will be down or at least have no redundancy due to missing disks. The only way I would consider running with USB connections in the array is if I had decided to not use a parity disk for some reason, such as only storing very unimportant data. Once you drop a disk in an array with parity then you have problems you need to address immediately.

Why are you running such an old version of Unraid? That is likely the problem. Newer versions of plugins can't be expected to support very old versions of Unraid.

USB connections in the array, though allowed, are NOT recommended due to unreliability. You say "preclear". Preclear is not done with a disk in the array. Perhaps you meant "clear" instead. You can test a drive using the manufacturer's software which is free for download.

Go to Tools-Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics zip file to your NEXT post.

Are you asking about how to get it to choose a different disk for writing?

Go to Tools-Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics zip file to your NEXT post.

GUI - I assume you mean you can access the Unraid webUI using the builtin firefox browser on the Unraid machine itself. But then you say Not sure what you mean here. If you are trying to access the Unraid webUI from another machine on your network then of course localhost, which is synonymous with 127.0.0.1, will not access the server from another machine. That will attempt to connect to a web server on the same machine. To access the Unraid webUI from a different machine on the network you would use http://tower (assuming you haven't changed the default server name) or http:// followed by the IP address of your Unraid server (not 127.0.0.1) So maybe you can clarify what exactly you mean when you say you can access the GUI but then you say you can't reach it with localhost.

I knew there were ways beyond the native windows to format >32GB FAT32 but didn't know the Flash Creator would do it.

After you get things square again, be sure to setup Notifications to alert you immediately by email or other agent as soon as Unraid detects a problem. Probably Unraid would have been nagging you the whole time you were letting this first problem go: Might also be a good idea to install Fix Common Problems plugin. I know it would have been nagging you every single day about that. And if you ever have any trouble again, please ask on the forum instead of trying random things which only make things worse.

Checkdisk on flash. Copy previous folder to root. Try upgrade again.

How large is the flash? 32GB is maximum for FAT32.

yes

The only thing New Config does is let you assign the disks however you want, and then optionally (by default) rebuild parity. Check the box saying parity is already valid, then you can run a non-correcting parity check to make sure everything is as expected. You can't really muck it up unless you assign a data disk to the parity slot, or agree to format any disk that has data on it.

GUID is the globally unique identifier required to assign an Unraid license to the flash drive. Without it you won't be able to use it with Unraid. Not saying it doesn't have a GUID, we don't know. And I don't know if that is any reason it shouldn't be able to prepare it for booting. Might be simpler if you just try a more reputable flash drive.

The simplest way forward will probably be to New Config with all the original disks back where they were. Then maybe a non-correcting parity check before trying it with the new disk assigned to slot2.

Might be best to post another screenshot before starting the array. In any case, shouldn't be anything to worry about since you still have the original disk2. Just don't format anything.