Unraid not coming back after reboot.

[sdub]

My Unraid system (X9DRH-7F mobo) has been running smoothly for 1.5 years.  It has onboard dual GbE and a dual 10GbE NIC installed.  

 

I powered down for the first time in 6 months to replace my PCIe NVM riser card with a dual NVMe card.  Long story short, my mobo doesn't support bifurcation.  Oh well.  I removed the card and reinstalled the old single NVMe riser that has worked since the initial build.

 

Now when I boot, NONE of the network cards are appearing and I'm getting a dummy IP address.

 

Furthermore, when I log in as root, I'm not prompted for a password, and it says "root@Tower" at the login prompt.  When I go to /boot I don't see the flash drive.. just some RAM filesystem with few files in it.   I tried running "diagnostic" but the file that it writes to the /boot/logs directory isn't there when I pull the USB drive.

 

If I boot to GUI mode the web browser gives a 404 error on localhost.  It almost seems like it's all stemming back to a problem with the flash drive not mounting properly at the start.

 

Any help where to start??  In the meantime, I'm going to try to make an Ubuntu boot USB to see what that does.  

[Squid]

Sounds an awful lot like your flash drive is dropping offline or you've got a USB controller isolated so that a VM can use it and the boot stick is in that port.  Try a different port

[sdub]

I was able to get the diagnostic file off the RAM drive using another USB disk.

 

I'll try plugging the flash drive into another port.  It's the internal USB port on the Mobo... the one I've always used.

tower-diagnostics-20220221-1307.zip

[Squid]

It did definitely drop.  If problems continue, transfer to another flash.  Sandisk FITs run hot due to their very small size

[sdub]

Copied flash to a big old Sandisk Cruzer Glide I found in the bottom of my sock drawer.  Voila!  Back online. Thanks.  It's interesting that it was too corrupt to boot off of, but just fine for copying files to a new drive.  

 

Hopefully it lasts at least a year in case I need to replace it again. I can't believe that Samsung Fit Plus died sometime between 12-18 months.  Seriously people, Don't use those little stubby USB drives!

 

I guess that's the problem with only rebooting every 6 months... no idea if latent failures are lurking.  My new best practice is to perform a reboot before I do any service or upgrades on the hardware.  Make sure it all comes back up cleanly to rule out the new stuff causing problems.