Hi, 

my UNRAID server (which was happily running the last couple of years) seems to have restarted over night and now doesn´t boot anymore.

It starts with the boot precedure, but then it´s stuck at the screen you can see attached.

I am able to successfully boot into non-GUI safe mode, but I don´t know where to go from there.

 

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,

Thorsten

Since I was able to boot into the console, I was able to create a diagnostics file. See attached.

 

unraid-diagnostics-20250325-1013.zip

42 minutes ago, hocky said:

I am able to successfully boot into non-GUI safe mode, but I don´t know where to go from there.

Do you mean you can access the WebGUI if you boot like that?

Looking at the diagnostics it seems the server loaded up successfully and had IP address 192.168.1.2.  Have you tried accessing the GUI via that address over the network?

 

The diagnostics also show that disk3 and disk4 appear to be missing - is this expected?  If not you should be carefully checking any cabling to these drives.

 

You also seem to be running quite an old version of Unraid (6.12.6) - is there any reason you have not upgraded to the current stable Unraid releases (6.12.15 or 7.0.1) other than perhaps leaving a stable system untouched)?

Thanks for the quick responses!

33 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Do you mean you can access the WebGUI if you boot like that?

I removed a couple of cards (GPU, NIC, RAID) and I´m now able to boot into the console GUI.

External access via putty or to the WebGUI is still not possible.

18 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Looking at the diagnostics it seems the server loaded up successfully and had IP address 192.168.1.2.  Have you tried accessing the GUI via that address over the network?

Yes, not possible. Also via putty.

19 minutes ago, itimpi said:

The diagnostics also show that disk3 and disk4 appear to be missing - is this expected?  If not you should be carefully checking any cabling to these drives.

Yeah, these two are sometimes not recongnized. But they are now.

19 minutes ago, itimpi said:

You also seem to be running quite an old version of Unraid (6.12.6) - is there any reason you have not upgraded to the current stable Unraid releases (6.12.15 or 7.0.1) other than perhaps leaving a stable system untouched)?

Yes, it´s the latter. Never touch a running system. As I mentioned, the server was running stable for quite some time now and I´m not chasing new features, so I left it as it is.

 

Attached is a new diagnostics file I collected after removing non-mandatory cards.

 

unraid-diagnostics-20250325-1111.zip

With all the cards removed, trying to do a standard boot gets stuck into this screen now:

Try booting with a different flash drive using a stock install, no key needed, that will confirm if it's a server or config issue.

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Try booting with a different flash drive using a stock install, no key needed, that will confirm if it's a server or config issue.

OK, that works.

That suggest the config is the problem, but in case it's your flash, try recreating the flash drive, first backup the current one, then recreate it using the USB tool, confirm that flash drive also boots with the stock install, and if yes, restore only the /config folder from the backup overwriting any existing files.

Seems to be the issue is a mixture of hardware and config issues.

I managed now to boot up the system will all drives attached and the array´s running fine.

However, the network config seems to be screwed up as I´m not able to ping the server from the outside and also not being able pinging from inside to the outside.

I think there´s some routing mismatch from configurations from the past and I´m not able to change it.

You can delete/rename /config/network.cfg and reboot, that will make the server go back to default DHCP settings.

Thank you - that fixed it! We´re back in business!

Thanks a lot for your support.

I´m happy the system is up and running again, but I´ll definitely schedule some maintenance time - it definitely needs some love. 

 

Enjoy your beer!

Edited March 25, 20251 yr by hocky

1 hour ago, hocky said:

managed now to boot up the system will all drives attached and the array´s running fine.

Why don't you have cache drive anymore?

 

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Why don't you have cache drive anymore?

 

These were attached to a RAID card I removed for testing. I think the RAID card is/was part of the problem. I rearranged the drives a bit and now everything´s attached to the mainboard´s SATA ports.
I´ll look into tidying up the system in a couple of weeks when I´ve got more time.

RAID cards are not recommended.