I recently tried to upgrade to the new version of Unraid doing the normal update process and after the auto-reboot my system is stuck on the blue boot screen.

Very similar to this person's issue here:

 

 

I removed the USB boot drive from my Unraid machine, plugged it into a laptop running Windows 10. It automatically detected problems, I clicked Repair, but the repair was unsuccessful, it kept saying disk was either read-only or write protected. 

 

I tried doing a CHKDSK on the USB drive, and no success. 

 

So I think I just need to use a new USB drive. I found these instructions and followed them.

https://wiki.unraid.net/UnRAID_6/Changing_The_Flash_Device

I am not able to make copied of my original USB drive, and no backups. I can see all the files on my old USB drive when plugging it into my Windows computer, but it's not letting me copy any of the files. 

I downloaded the latest Unraid and installed on a new USB drive using the USB creator tool. I was able to boot up my new machine

 

On the Wiki instructions I came across this note:

"To ensure no data loss after the server is booted, you will need to make sure you assign each disk to the array / cache exactly as it was prior to the failure. If you do not know which disks were assigned where, create a post in the forum for further assistance."

 

I do not remember exactly how the drives were set up. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I really don't want to lose all my files. 

 

Currently I have two USB drives;

- Old USB drive = seems to be corupted

- New USB drive = I have Unraid installed on it, but have not yet transferred my Registration Key to the new USB drive yet.

 

Should I go ahead and transfer my registration to the new USB drive, and get that plugged into my Unraid computer?

I'm confused how I should set things up after that to a way where I will not lose all the files on my hard drives. 

I wonder why nobody replied here.

Anyway, what I think is that you can indeed transfer the key to the new drive since the old one is unusable anyway.

Furthermore, if you would hypothetically boot from the old USB, it would probably fall back to a trial version or you would simply not be able to start the array, unless you talk to the support.

 

Regarding your files, nothing should happen to them before starting them in an array.

So if you don't remember your old assignment order, it would likely be best to mount them with unassigned devices or on another computer and backup the data.

After, you could try to simply start the old array on the new USB.

 

All your settings and docker/vm configs will be gone, though the data will likely be there (depending on your previous settings)

 

Good luck 😃