Flash Drive Died?

[stanger89]

So from what I've read here, and looking at my logs, I'm guessing my Flash drive died, seems I have no /boot and I'm seeing lots of "Warning: parse_ini_file(state/*.ini)" errors in the web GUI.

 

Ironically(?) the server and all the services seem to be running happily, so the question is, dare I just reboot, I'd have to do it through the command line (shutdown -r?).  Is there anything I should do prior to that to make sure that the machine will happily boot on restart?

 

Mainly since the server seems content right now, I'd like to get everything prepared so I don't want to restart it into a non-functional state.

 

Thanks

unraid-diagnostics-20210924-0721.zip

[JonathanM]

Do you have a current flash backup?

 

The odds are not good that it will come back up without help.

 

When you do get to that inevitable point of shutting down, try your best to stop everything normally, including stopping the array itself. If you force a shutdown with array disks mounted you run the risk of parity not being in sync.

[stanger89]

It does look like I've got a backup from a few days ago.  I kind of figured odds weren't high, but I'd seen some reports of similar errors from people just bumping their flash drive, so I wasn't sure.  I'll have to look into flash drive recommendations again now.

 

Since emhttp is completely dead, at least for the purposes of shutdown, is running "shutdown" from the command line the right way to do it now?  I remember a few years ago you were supposed to manually stop the array first.

 

[trurl]

shutdown will stop the array if it can, but since flash cannot be written, Unraid won't know when you reboot that it was ever stopped so you will get automatic parity check.

[stanger89]

Thanks for the help, just wanted to make sure I did things in a way that didn't make things worse.  Swapped out the stick, the parity check is running and all appears fine.

 

FYI:

After I shutdown the server ("powerdown" is the command that worked for me), I pulled the USB stick out and stuck it in my main PC.  Windows said it needed to be checked, but found no issues.  Turned out the flash drive appears fine.  Well out of an abundance of caution I replaced it anyway with a Cruzer Fit I wasn't using.  So while I had a backup from a few days ago from the Community Applications plugin, I was able to copy the config over from the "failed" stick to the new one.

[JonathanM]

FYI your Unraid license is tied to the physical stick, and you are only allowed 1 automatic transfer per year. So, you can never use the original stick for Unraid again since it will be blacklisted after the license is migrated to the new stick, and if this stick dies and you need another transfer before the year is up, you would need to talk directly to support and explain your situation.

 

Given that, I advise people to not transfer licenses to new sticks just for the fun of it.

 

What's done is done, but I personally would have given the old stick another chance, while keeping your flash backups up to date.

[stanger89]

Yeah, I saw that about blacklisting sticks before I did it, and I know what you're saying, but that original stick was a 2GB Cruzer, probably 11 years old.  And on top of that it stuck out of the back and was pretty easy to bump, so I wouldn't really say changing sticks was "for the fun of it", more like, even if it was just because it got bumped, I don't feel like risking it going forward.

[JonathanM]

28 minutes ago, stanger89 said:

Yeah, I saw that about blacklisting sticks before I did it, and I know what you're saying, but that original stick was a 2GB Cruzer, probably 11 years old.  And on top of that it stuck out of the back and was pretty easy to bump, so I wouldn't really say changing sticks was "for the fun of it", more like, even if it was just because it got bumped, I don't feel like risking it going forward.

Cool. That paints a much more compelling picture for changing it out.

 

 

[stanger89]

Well you guys might have been right, maybe it wasn't the flash drive (still sorta glad I have a new one), I'm seeing the same symptoms rather frequently now.  I thought I had a docker eating all my memory (jrivermc28), but I setup a script to restart it every night, so I don't think that's it.

 

Here's what I've seen, I had it happen yesterday where the web GUI was riddled with "Warning: parse_ini_file(" errors, restarted the server it was fine.  Now this morning (now) it  happened again.  I was actually looking at some pages, checking the stats page looking at memory usage, I'd restarted the jriver docker since it was up to about 1.6GB of memory.  It was shortly after that, that I went to a different web gui page and was greeted with all the parse_ini_file errors.  This time I do still have a /boot.

 

Actually I can still see/read the ini files from the unraid shell in /var/local/emhttp

 

I've attached the last two sets of diagnostics if anyone has any ideas?

Thanks

unraid-diagnostics-20220110-1351.zip unraid-diagnostics-20220111-0740.zip