Unclean shutdown after checking Opnsense sd drive into Unassigned devices. Missing cache drive recovered

Hi,

This isn't a request for help, its more of a situation recovery for those that end up in the same place. Jump to the bold underline below, if you just want the final solution.

I've been on a mission to consolidate photos that are on different devices onto unRaid.

Going through a bunch of portable SSDs and thumb drives, I plugged in one of the SSDs which contained an opnSense installation. From what I can tell, it mounted in root. The GUI became unresponsive, although I could still ssh into the server. 

There was high cpu usage on shfs and then gzip (can't explain that) and I couldn't do a graceful shutdown, even after umounting the disks. I had to do a hard shutdown.

After a reboot, the GPU wouldn't pass through and I realised that one of my cache drives had disappeared.

I tried rebooting and checking CMOS, but the drive wasn't listed. It wasn't listed under shell's df command either (why would it, when its not in the CMOS). 

I started the array without it and everything seemed normal, except the cache drive contained all my VMs.

Long story short, I came across a post where somebody had a similar issue and couldn't recover from a reboot, but did after a power cycle.

The power cycle helped rediscover the drive and adding it back into the array, it seems everything is fine, with no extra steps needed.

I'm running a parity check to see if there is anything else.

Losing the VMs would be a pain, but not so much as removing the m.2 drive, as its inside the motherboard and its a watercooled setup.

I think its time to build a second unRaid server that can do scheduled backups. The other lesson learnt, is to be careful what is automounting, including your own unlabelled drives.

Edited March 12, 20242 yr by Geck0