Hey there. Recently had an issue with a failing USB drive. Was able to recover the drive and get a new boot USB up and ready to go. Which is great.

That said, I've had an issue with Shares ever since. I cannot change "Export" to "Yes" to get SMB up and running on my shares on SMB Security Settings on any of my shares. Having a hell of a time trying to figure out why. This is true for any settings I try to change in Shares.

FWIW: I have run Docker Safe New Perms.

UPDATE: Here's a list of some troubleshooting I have taken a crack at, along with the diags attached.

• Changed to a brand new USB drive

• Manually moved Cache to Array (there was stuff stuck there that couldn't move with Mover). I have since taken the cache offline for now.

• I have checked to make sure SMB is set to Yes (Workgroup). It is.

• I am able to change settings in other sections (like docker settings) and it will save. It is only in Shares.

• I made a dummy share to see if the new share could change the settings. It will not.

monster-diagnostics-20250527-1355.zip

Edited May 27, 20251 yr by ShawnTempesta
Adding Diagnostic and TL;DRing the topic.

You are likely to get better informed feedback if you attach your system’s diagnostics (with everything in the one zip file) to your next post in this thread. It is always a good idea when asking questions to supply your diagnostics so we can see details of your system, how you have things configured, and the current syslog.

Thanks! Here's the diagnostic. And it turns out nothing changed in Shares settings saves/sticks. It all reverts back.

monster-diagnostics-20250527-1355.zip

Latest: Finding in the log lines like this:

May 27 13:44:52 Monster emhttpd: error: put_config_idx, 609: Not a directory (20): fopen: /boot/config/shares/downloads.cfg

First go to SETTINGS >>>> SMB and check that Enable SMB: is set to "Yes (Workgroup)'.

It is set to that. Has been from the start... checked a bit ago.

Make sure you have this setup for all your shares:

Once you have something besides 'Array' for Primary, you will be give a choice for a secondary location.

And you should see something like this:

All are currently set to Array. However even if I wanted to change the settings, on "Save" it reverts back to the way it was.

That would seem to me that, for what ever reason, Unraid is unable to write to your Flash Drive.

I will check this out. Also worth noting I am looking in the Flash Drive and config\data\ does not exist.

Update: I have ported to a new USB drive to see if that is the problem - it is not. Still won't save any settings.

5 hours ago, ShawnTempesta said:

Latest: Finding in the log lines like this:

May 27 13:44:52 Monster emhttpd: error: put_config_idx, 609: Not a directory (20): fopen: /boot/config/shares/downloads.cfg

From the MAIN tab, click on the 'Flash' under the Boot Device. Now share the drive via SMB and make it read/write. Open this share of your PC.

Look on the boot drive at /config/shares and you should find .cfg files. One for every share that this server has. Open these files with a simple text editor (like Notepad). It should contain about 21 lines of text material. If it does not, Modify the file by adding space. Try to write the file back to the flash drive.

This is the rub. There is no shares folder. The final folder in the list of folders is "pools". No shares.

Yet, of course, I can see all of my shares in the shares section on Unraid.

Update: There is a file named "Shares" that doesn't associate itself as a folder. When trying to manually add a folder called "Shares" it says it isn't possible because there is already a folder name called Shares. Interesting.

The USB originally replaced because it seemed to be going bad. Perhaps this is part of that.

OK WE HAVE SOMETHING HERE.

I have the file "shares" which Windows, despite displaying as a file, considers an unopenable folder (as I can't name a folder shares). I RENAMED that file to "shares1"

I then created a new folder called "shares". I went to SMB and changed the settings and they stuck.

So, long story short, it looks like I'll be able to go down the list and add whatever shares to SMB fresh and it should take.

@ShawnTempesta A file appearing on the flash drive instead of a folder of the same name is a standard symptom of corruption being detected on the flash drive and the repair process not being able to recover it correctly. In such a case restoring from backups does not work as it puts the 'bad' file back stopping the needed folder from being created.

I wonder if this is something that the Fix Common Problems plugin can be improved to handle by giving a clear error message and describing how to fix it.

Even better detecting this scenario in the core Unraid code used for saving config files and taking appropriate action would be nice.

14 hours ago, ShawnTempesta said:

Recently had an issue with a failing USB drive. Was able to recover the drive and get a new boot USB up and ready to go. Which is great.

And

6 hours ago, ShawnTempesta said:

I have the file "shares" which Windows, despite displaying as a file, considers an unopenable folder (as I can't name a folder shares). I RENAMED that file to "shares1"

I then created a new folder called "shares". I went to SMB and changed the settings and they stuck.

@ShawnTempesta, Let me guess what happened. Your Boot drive failed and you got a new one. Either, You copied the files from the old one to the new one or, you copied the files from a backup of the old drive. As @itimpi said there was a corruption in that source and the directories on the new drive were not created as required! Even worse, it created a file instead of a directory. There can only be one thing (either a file or directory) for each unique name in any folder or directory. So once, that file, 'shares', was created, the Unraid OS could not create directory named 'shares' as it usually does! So there was no directory (or path) to write the configuration files (.cfg) for each share.

This is what the default /config initially looks like:

Every other entry you now see on your Boot drive was added by the Unraid OS as you configured your server!

Edited May 28, 20251 yr by Frank1940