Another disappearing drive post

[Jim S]

Alright this may take a minute to run through, but I'm trying define as many symptoms up front. Obviously, some of what I include may not be of impact, but just in case. I'm not too proud to understand that I probably goofed somewhere in the process.

I was originally using a Netgear ReadyNAS for Plex Media duties, but had decided to upgrade to a full blown media server. Built up the hardware.

Specifics will be in the logs, but here's the gist
CPU: AMD 3800X 
Asus x570 Tuf Gaming motherboard (I know gaming MB, but I was familiar with it and it had the interfaces I thought I'd need)
32 GB memory (2x16)
Nvidia GT710 (repurposed from an old machine just to get Unraid rolling)
8 GB Cruzer Micro
500 GB Samsung 860 for cache
(2) 8TB Seagates (1 parity/1 data)
EVGA 850 G+ Power supply

 

Began running Unraid 6.8.3 under a trial license in mid December. Played around with dockers and some basic Plex functions for a couple of days. Things seemed pretty solid. So I began shuffling media files from the NAS to my desktop drives. I wanted to incorporate those NAS drives into the array. So far, so good.

I moved 2 additional 8TB Seagate drives into the new server and began preclearing them via gfjardim's pleclear plugin. This was where the first head scratcher occurred. The drives passed their prechecks just fine and started zeroing, 16 hours later, started zeroing again, another 16 hours, and when it started a third round of zeroing, my impatience got he better of me. I interrupted the third zeroing as I suspected something had gone awry. Nothing I researched said anything about repeated zeroing cycles. I let the core Unraid code perform the preclear process. Seemed to go fine this time and the drives were incorporated into the array.

 

Spent the next day moving the 3TB of media files over to the array. Again, so far so good.

 

As a Christmas present to myself was I had picked up a 1050ti. I wanted the ability to offload some of the transcoding. So I performed a normal shutdown, cracked the case open and installed it. On the agenda for the day was to picked up a license for Unraid as well. However, this was the day of the Nashville bombing. At that point, I was still running a trial copy. My ISP is AT&T, which would not return service for another 3 and a half days. I wanted to be able to run the Plex server since streaming services were out of the question. So, I tethered my cell phone to one of my computers and shared the connection to the Unraid server. This allowed me to pick up the Unraid license.

 

Internet connectivity is back up a couple of days later.

 

This is where the current issues seemed to begin. After I installed the license I noticed by cache drive missing from the main tab. Reselecting the Main tab refreshed things and then drive groups randomly did not appear. Sometimes the Boot device, sometime the Cache drive, sometimes the array, sometime the Shares on their tab would not appear. Sometimes the Boot device AND the Cache would not appear. I was worried that the video card might be an issue so I pulled the 1050ti and reinstalled the GT 710, no change. I had researched as much as I could but could find nothing that seemed to match my server's symptoms. I gave up for the evening, but left things running.

 

The next morning things seemed fine. Drives and shares were all there. Dockers were all stable. I shrugged, but was just happy to have things back up. I stopped looking for fixes.

 

Fast forward a week or so and mysteriously I couldn't pull up the Plex web UI. Restart the docker and no change. Click on the Main tab and lo and behold the cache drive wasn't there. Click the Main tab a few times and just like before, drives appeared and disappeared seemingly randomly. This is probably where my Unraid inexperience really showed. I performed a clean shutdown and start. Still can't bring up the Plex web UI. Home Assistant took multiple docker restarts to finally come up. 

I've included the most recent diagnostics file as well as one from Christmas day.

 

Thanks in advance,
Jim

phoenix-diagnostics-20210103-1400.zip phoenix-diagnostics-20201225-2145.zip

[JorgeB]

Both diags are just after rebooting, you need to grab ones after the problem and before rebooting.

[Jim S]

Thanks for taking a look. System has been up for a little more than 19 hours now. I've included the most recent diag. The trouble starts immediately after reboot and persists even now. 

 

Just a couple more clues. The Plex media can be accessed from the client on my Roku, but I still can't hit the Web UI from the docker menu. There are portions of the Home Assistant Web UI that were inaccessible, but I can access now.

 

I've also included a couple of screen shots of what I'm seeing at the Main tab. Sometimes everything is there...sometimes not. The clips were taken after successive refreshes.

 

Jim

phoenix-diagnostics-20210104-0728.zip

[JorgeB]

That's a GUI problem, cache device is always there, try rebooting in safe mode.

[Jim S]

Booted to Unraid OS GUI Safe Mode (no plugins). Same results and same seemingly random docker behavior. Can't access Plex Web UI and while I can get into Home Assistant, I can't access a number of options menus. 

 

I did an additional reboot into safe mode after also telling the dockers to not autostart. Same results. The diag file at 1626 was pulled after that reboot.

 

Do I need to boot to Safe mode no gui/no plugins? I see that I can run diagnostics from cli. However, once I have done so what would be the command to return it to the GUI interface on the next reboot?

 

I'll let it run for a little bit and pull another diagnostic.

 

phoenix-diagnostics-20210104-1542.zip phoenix-diagnostics-20210104-1626.zip

Edited January 4, 2021 by Jim S
Added test

[trurl]

Do you have adblocker or anything else that might interfere with the Unraid webUI? Have you tried other browsers?

[Jim S]

No ad/popup blockers.

 

However, you know, I suppose everyone overlooks the basics now and again. But dang it!

 

Cleared the cache and cookies and restarted Chrome. Docker web UI's are fine now. 

 

Still getting random disappearing drives, but as long as the underlying system is running fine I can live with that until 6.9 moves to stable release. Maybe upgrading will knock something loose and fix that too.

 

Thank you both.

 

Jim