I have been using Unraid for about a year and a half.  In that time, it has crashed 4 times.  This week is crash number 5.

 

Symptom?  Fails to boot from USB drive.  Just sits there with a blinking cursor.

 

Have followed all suggestions, only thing that fixes it is to re-install Unraid to the USB drive.  Have re-created on different USB drives.  Same result.

 

All in all, I have an openmedia server with 12 drives that has not failed in almost 10 years.  On the exact same hardware as Unraid.  Through thunderstorms, power outages, network, and internet outages.  It always comes back.  Unraid?  Not so much.  What is different about openmedia and Unraid?  It doesn't require you to boot from a USB drive, which is inherently unreliable.

 

Go ahead and flame me.  Tell me how this forum is only supported by volunteers and if I expect more, to pay for support.  In 10 years time, I have never had to contact openmedia because it failed to boot or serve our files.  This is coming from real-world experience.  As I said from the very start, I am not impressed.  Most of the software in our data center has been much more reliable than Unraid has.

16 hours ago, SH Development said:

Fails to boot from USB drive.  Just sits there with a blinking cursor.

I've had that happen to me four times in the 12 years I have been using Unraid on three different servers and all for different reasons.  I certainly cannot say that any of these are causing the issue for you, but, I can say that there are various causes for this behavior and I have no idea what they all are.

 

1.  I was using a particular parameter with sysllinux.cfg to solve an iGPU issue.  A later kernel version resolved the original issue so the syslinux boot parameter was now causing a blinking cursor and no boot.  I removed that parameter and all was well.

 

2.  A BIOS upgrade caused my system to no longer boot in legacy mode (just got a blinking cursor).  I had to set Unraid to boot in UEFI and that solved the problem

 

3.  I had to get a new motherboard under warranty as the IPMI chip failed.  Same model and BIOS version as previous board.  Used the same USB flash drive.  With new board it simply would not boot.  Sometimes I would get "no unraid device found" and sometimes just a blinking cursor.  Same flash drive would boot Unraid in other servers.  I rebuilt the previously working USB flash drive with a backup; nothing changed.  I tried several other USB flash drives; nothing.  Finally, I went out and bought a new flash drive with which other had reported success and it worked!  It has been booting that Unraid system without issue for two years now.  This makes no sense but my "new" motherboard simply was extremely picky about what flash drive it would accept to boot even though, supposedly, nothing changed.

 

4.)  Power cut (before I had the system on a UPS) caused some unseen corruption on the USB flash drive.  It would not boot (blinking cursor).  I had to completely rebuild the flash drive and it worked again.

 

17 hours ago, SH Development said:

Go ahead and flame me. 

No reason to do that as clearly there is some issue with your system.  I took my shot in the dark to explain the behavior based on my experience but I don't think it is necessarily an inherent problem with the Unraid software.  There is some combination of who knows what that is causing you problems.  Again, I am not saying that there are no issues with Unraid, but, my experience with it has been that the problems I have had have come down to 1) hardware issues, 2) configuration issues and 3) Unraid software issues in that order.

 

Hopefully, others with their experience may be able to provide other possible solutions.

From my perspective, it's been very reliable - in the sense it's never outright crashed (knock on wood). Even as hardware (thumbdrives and cache drives on two occasions) was failing it just chugged along, and when the broken things were replaced, it went right back to doing what it does.

@SH Development, Please explain what you mean by a 'crash'.  I read what you wrote.  What is missing is what happened prior to the restart of the server.  

 

Did it shutdown gracefully?

 

Was there a power cut that forced an unclean shutdown?

 

Did the server become unresponsive and you forced either a shutdown or a reboot? 

 

Do you have a UPS for this server?

 

You can also set up the Syslog Server to capture the syslog up to the time of the problem.  That may provide clues as to what is going on.

Rock SOLID here, two of them.

 

You must have some funky hardware issues / conflicts, 

Still down, no fix in sight other than to restart from scratch and hope my data is still there.  Fortunately for me, I don't rely on Unraid as my primary backup solution.

 

I have the USB drive that reads, still shows all the unraid files, just won't boot.  Maybe I'm too much of a rookie to know what to do next from renaming or manipulating the existing files to make it work again.

 

Yes, something appears to have gotten corrupted.  Yes, it was a hard power down.  My point is still the same, I have other NAS servers running that do not exhibit failure under that scenario.  If Unraid fails under those conditions, and my others do not, then that still makes my statement true, Unraid is unreliable.

Edited November 18, 20241 yr by SH Development

On 11/16/2024 at 5:12 PM, IonelChila said:

Rock SOLID here, two of them.

 

You must have some funky hardware issues / conflicts, 

I wish I could believe that.  Except the Unraid configuration is running on the exact same hardware/conflicts that my openmedia server is running, without issue.  Nice try.

3 hours ago, SH Development said:

I wish I could believe that.  Except the Unraid configuration is running on the exact same hardware/conflicts that my openmedia server is running, without issue.  Nice try.

OK

22 hours ago, SH Development said:

Unraid is unreliable.

For you, this is undoubtedly true as you have not yet identified the root cause of your "crashing" issues.  For me and others who have been running Unraid for 10+ years, this has not been our experience in general.  That's the problem with blanket statements.

 

There certainly are a number of issues which could cause problems with Unraid systems (as I documented above).  If Unraid were inherently unstable in all situations, Limetech would not still be around all these years later.  Hopefully, something said in these forums will point you toward the solution for your system. 

 

Yes, I agree that the USB boot flash drive is likely the weakest part of the system and most prone to problems.

Bottom line, I am STILL down.  Is there a step-by-step guide somewhere as to how I can recover the configuration I have on the flash drive I have.  That is still reading fine.

You just need to copy the complete /config folder, then create the new flash drive and restore that, overwriting any existing files, the final step is to transfer the key.

I am also having issues with booting from the usb stick, this is a samsung fit 3.1. Samsung no longer sells usb 2.0 sticks in 2024, at least not in my area.

 

It fails during the boot with error 'unable to enumerate usb device', then i have to press enter to reboot. Tried this 3 times then i gave up and reinstalled the OS from a flash backup.

This fixed the issue and managed to boot in, then I decided to see how stable it is so I rebooted the system another 5 times in a row. The 5th time it failed with the same i/o errors and  'unable to enumerate usb device' and again I had to restore from a flash backup to be able to boot back in.

 

I didn't try to boot the server another 5 times because this is obviously an issue with the OS getting corrupted somehow and failing to check something, probably the usb stick hardware ID. Fast boot is disabled in bios.

 

Not sure why in 2024 we are still keeping the OS on a flash drive, if it is a licensing concern you could always do a check via internet once in a while based on some hardware ID.

 

Edited November 22, 20241 yr by cprn.1337

On 11/15/2024 at 10:57 PM, SH Development said:

 

All in all, I have an openmedia server with 12 drives that has not failed in almost 10 years.  On the exact same hardware as Unraid

 

Except your Unraid system has one or more hardware issues - I don't normally bet, but I'm like 99.99999% confident in this.  Bad RAM, bad USB ports, etc. It's pretty common to attribute hardware issues to software.

 

Your Unraid crashes are the effect of the issue, not the cause.

 

 

 

Edited November 22, 20241 yr by Espressomatic

1 hour ago, Espressomatic said:

 

Except your Unraid system has one or more hardware issues - I don't normally bet, but I'm like 99.99999% confident in this.  Bad RAM, bad USB ports, etc. It's pretty common to attribute hardware issues to software.

 

Your Unraid crashes are the effect of the issue, not the cause.

 

 

 

Well, you have a different perspective.  In my experience, software is 99.99999% attributed to crashes.  We shall see.  I am re-installing everything on another server that is exactly the same hardware with a new USB.

Use a USB2 port on the motherboard for the Unraid boot drive.   Several years ago, there were a few MB, BIOS combinations that would 'lose' the Unraid boot drive during startup. 

2 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Use a USB2 port on the motherboard for the Unraid boot drive

 

In my experience, USB 2 or 3, port or drive, has made no difference. They all work well on all my systems.

 

2 hours ago, SH Development said:

In my experience, software is 99.99999% attributed to crashes

 

Exactly my point - hardware issues are almost always first thought to be caused by software. The issues you're seeing however, are not caused by Unraid.  Want a sure-fire way to prove this? You said you have two identical systems. Swap the OSes on those systems. Put Unraid on the other system and OMV on the crashing system.

 

 

On 11/22/2024 at 6:28 PM, Espressomatic said:

 

In my experience, USB 2 or 3, port or drive, has made no difference. They all work well on all my systems.

 

 

Exactly my point - hardware issues are almost always first thought to be caused by software. The issues you're seeing however, are not caused by Unraid.  Want a sure-fire way to prove this? You said you have two identical systems. Swap the OSes on those systems. Put Unraid on the other system and OMV on the crashing system.

 

 

That is what I said I was doing.

13 minutes ago, SH Development said:

That is what I said I was doing.

 

If that's the case, I'm not sure where you mentioned that. I just re-read your posts again quickly and I don't see an obvious indication where you mention that you've swapped the systems for BOTH OSes.  I see clearly you mentioned you have two instances of the same hardware, but only that one runs OMV full time without issue.

 

It's possible that 1 or 2 people have found a deep rooted software issue that causes complete USB corruption on a regular basis and that the other few thousand installations that don't exhibit the issue have just been super lucky.

 

Or maybe it's more likely that the thousands of installations  are the rule rather than the exceptions, and that 1 or 2 people have some hardware issue causing their problems.