Been an interesting few days.  Timeline:

1. Tried to remove some cache drives, borked it.  Had to rebuild my cache from backups and resize the pool.
2. Got the system working as usual again, backups restores, parity synced, etc.  All set.
3. Installed a new plugin (VM Backup) and ran it once.
4. Rebooted the system, and no GUI came up.  I can log into the terminal and SSH without issue
5. Booted into safe mode, all seems fine.
6. Removed the VMBackup .plg and folder from /boot/config/plugins
7. Still can't boot into normal mode

 

Diagnostics attached.  I do have a brand new flash drive handy if drive corruption is suspected.

 

Thoughts?  Thanks for the help.

tower-diagnostics-20211209-0803.zip

If it boots in safe mode it's suggests a plugin issue, remove/rename all *.plg files in the flash drive then see if boots, if yes start installing them one by one.

I started removing plugins based on their update dates.  I removed only one:

• CA Mover Tuning

...and I was able to restart.  

 

I then saw there is an update today for the Unassigned Devices plugin that I still had installed.  This is in the release notes for that update:

Unassigned.devices

2021.12.08
Fix: Deal gracefully with udev not returning any information on a partition.
Fix: Issue with loss of GUI on 6.9.

2021.12.07
Add: Show a disk that drops out of the array and ends up as an unassigned device as unmountable and mark it as 'Array'.
Fix: Rewrite check for used share name because the scheme used interferred with a device mount.

 

I wonder if the "Loss of GUI on 6.9" is my issue.

 

In any case, I updated to it and was able to reboot again.  I'll mark this SOLVED for now.