Frank1940

I hope that one of the two of you will create a Bug Report for the version that you are currently running. That is the only way that you can bring this to a attention of the developers and get it on the schedule to be corrected.

With Dual Parity, data drives position does matter. (Parity2 is calculated using a matrix math operation.) Parity1 is position independent. To clarify this a bit more, using the flash drive backup option, the default location for this zip file in the 'Downloads' directory that you have setup for your browser on your PC.

Be sure to check pop-up blockers and privacy plugins that you have installed. Double check to see what the default privacy and security settings are on your browsers. You do need things to be a bit 'looser' as regards to security than for normal browsing.

WOW!! Nine MIA disks from the drive configuration that you loaded! Give us a history (as complete as you can remember it) about this server. How many drives were in the array? Did you have any cache drives? Did you have any disks that were being mounted using the Unassigned Devices plugin. When was the last time you added, changed or moved any of the disks that are currently in the server?

Let's discuss this before you actually do anything with this backup. I am concerned about what you mean by the "another machine" phase in the above quote. The /config folder has information on the drive assignments and things can rapidly move from 'bad' to 'catastrophic' If these are not correct!!!!

It could be helpful to know if the you had single or dual parity.

I looked at your Diagnostic file and it is showing that you have four 1Gb sticks installed.

After the parity check is completed, go to TOOLS >>> Diagnostics and upload the resulting file in a new post.

Rather than using a internal USB plug, you might want to consider the use of a short USB extender cable (note, I did not say USB cable), tape the female end to the side of the case and plug the flash drive into that. That eliminates the flash drive sticking out and keeps it cooler which will extend its life. (Antecedent evidence seems to suggest that full size flash drives with of small capacity (today, say, 8GB) have longer life than smaller, larger capacity flash drives.) And always buy that flash drive from a manufacturer who actually makes their own drives.

I know the reference to the Upgrade WIKI was posted earlier in this thread but I want to take a moment to point to the 'simple' guide that was written for folks with a simple Unraid NAS: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/37354-upgrading-unraid-from-version-5-to-version-6/ Near the bottom of the first post, you will find a link to a PDF file of the basic instruction for folks with simple NAS setups. The WIKI includes solutions to virtually every problem which folks encountered in doing the upgrade. Read the PDF first! Remember to make that backup of the Flash Drive before you start to do anything!!!! (If you do it, you will never need it! 😏 ) I just downloaded and unzipped the latest stable version (6.8.3) of Unraid and it is 214MB in size so it will fit on your 1GB flash drive without an issue. You can do the version upgrade without worrying about the flash drive. After you have version 6 running, you can then upgrade the flash drive using the automatic process that LimeTech now provides. It has now been five plus years since version 6 came out and most of us have moved on from Version 5 long ago so getting answers on why something is not working now will be difficult. From what I see, your Parity is valid so your data is safe at this point. So you can safely do the upgrade without a worry of data loss. To upgrade to a simple version 6 NAS only setup, should only take three to four hours at the max as I recall-- including the reading and research. (If you have a lot of plugins all of those will have to reinstalled from scratch. I would suggest that you use DOCKER's rather than plugins wherever possible!)

Could this be what you are looking for?

A few years back, I did a bit of statistical analysis on no parity, single parity and dual parity setups. You can find it here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/50504-dual-or-single-parity-its-your-choice/ There is also some very good discussion about hard drive failures and other considerations for data safety. It was pointed out that dual parity actually provides additional benefits in the case where a second drive fails during the rebuild of what was thought to be a single drive failure. (Drive rebuilds take about two hours per TB of disk size (6TB drive will take about 12 hours) and can be done unattended. Data restoration usually take longer and are a much bigger hassle!) EDIT: Please notice that as the number of drives in the array increase, the chances of a drive failure really become quite significant!

Any time you are working around SATA cables, double check that every cable (both data and power) is firmly seated before you power things back up. (The SATA connector design is a poster child for how not to design a connector system!!! I personally avoid dressing SATA cables into 'neatest' bundles using cable ties because of potential connector issues when these bundles are subjected to even the slightest movement.)

As I recall, this is the first time that LimeTech has released a beta to the general public. In the past, they have putout a release candidate (rc) prior to the final release of a major update. (The first rc release seems to be preceded in most cases by a closed beta cycle involving people who seem to have a NDA.) This release cycle has often been long and involved (with sometimes much discussion about the process) but I will not get into that here. LimeTech is much better than many software companies today. They seem to continue the development process on each stable release until every known bug has been squashed before that version is released! This tends to make for very long release cycles with no insight as to its release date since that is determined by the point in time when bugs are gone.