I recently experienced two array drive failures while I was out of town for several days. Upon my return home, there were two drive offline. Fortunately I had 2 parity disks so I swapped in some replacements and started a rebuild.

During the rebuild I noticed that the two new drives were not being emulated and it said that they needed to be formatted. At this point I suspected the drives hadn't physically failed but both had some sort of file system error. Since the rebuild was already started, I let it proceed while I plugged the drives into a USB port and looked at them further.

As unassigned devices, I ran the file check which did indicate there were file system errors of some sort. The array HDDs are formatted with XFS. When I mounted the drives I could read the files fine so I just copied them back to the shares. It took a bit of time but seemed the safest route.

After moving the files from the failed disks back to the array, I tried to play them using plex and received the following... Playback Error: An error occurred loading items to play.

I rescanned the libraries and got the same error. I also tried playing a file that I confirmed was NOT located on one of the affected drives. Still, I received the same error. The same video file plays just fine through explorer and VLC . I also tried a music file, which is located on another system entirely but accessed by Plex as a remote share. This also would not play. At this point it seems pretty clear the problem is with plex. It might have (or not) been caused by the drive failure, but that seems unlikely. The appdata folder is located on a solid state cache the was not directly affected by the HDD failures. I tried restoring plex from my appdata backup, and still no luck.

Any tips for repairing the plex database short of starting from scratch?