Hi, I had a rather old drive that had multiple SMART errors and also had aged. I replaced it with a new 8TB drive (BST0) and since then, I am facing random server halts, sometimes the error count on the drive goes up. I have to hit a hard shutdown and boot, which wakens up parity and then a day goes by in building it. SMART checks on the 8TB drive don't show anything amiss. I've also ensured the cables are swapped, just in case. Can anyone look at the diagnostics and figure out what ails this machine or HDD. Is there something I am not seeing?

Any help would be appreciated. Right now the disk is being emulated and parity check is running again. I've paused it and gotten the array down. Suggest me next steps. Should I re-add the drive (like I have before and it works well for a week) and then starts throwing errors again.

baloo-diagnostics-20251028-1751.zip

It's not logged as a disk problem; replace both cables for disk3 and post new diagnostics after array start

It was the cable. Thank you. A follow on question. I use a Lsi card with 2x cables that have 4 sata connectors each and it was the first time one of those 4 cables have errored out. I took a new cable and connected the drive to the mother board directly at this point. I have ordered a new cable - but I am also curious to know if at any time the LSi card errors out on one of its ports? i.e not a cable mistake and a card issue/error? Thanks

2 hours ago, maverhick said:

if at any time the LSi card errors out on one of its ports?

It's also possible, but most often it's the cables, so recommend replacing that first and retest.

There seems to be a cascading issue :) .. All the parity was rebuilt and so was Disk 3 and the machine was working for a day before it hung. I attached a screen and realized the following

1) It was a BIOS bootloop. The machine kept entering the BIOS setup on its own on every reboot and not moving ahead
a) To fix this, I tried two things - disable CSM and also disable Secure mode
b) This moved things along to the next point where I saw the error "Failed to load ldlinux.c32"

This got me worried .. I figured it might be due to the above CSM / Secure mode settings. But now the machine refused to boot up into the Bios itself. Just the fan roaring at startup and not moving ahead

Now, I removed the power cable, discharged the machine and then removed the CMOS battery and then replaced it with a new one. The BIOS worked again and I went and re-enabled CSM and Secure mode

Now, the machine again boots to the error message "Failed to load ldlinux.c32"

I want to be very cautious here and not lose any config or bungle up this very long weekend - Please suggest next steps

Edited to Add - I had upgraded to 7.2 without an issue and it ran for a while before the BIOS bootloop

Edited November 1, 2025Nov 1 by maverhick

Since you disabled CSM, did you check that the EFI folder on the flash drive does not have a trailing "-" character? If so remove it so that UEFI boot is enabled.

6 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Since you disabled CSM, did you check that the EFI folder on the flash drive does not have a trailing "-" character? If so remove it so that UEFI boot is enabled.

I re-enabled CSM and then found this error. Also USB bootup is setup to Legacy and not UEFI. Let me know what I need to do. i.e CSM ON, UEFI boot on and then check if Flash drive EFI folder has a trailing - ? and remove it if it exists?

What if its legacy in the BIOS and not UEFI, does anything change? Should I consider disabling CSM again and turning UEFI boot on and then removing the trailing - ?

If you have UEFI boot option available in Unraid, you can still boot CSM. Which option is used to boot is controlled by the BIOS, no problem having both enabled in Unraid.

@JorgeB I am unclear on next steps. Should I dig into the bios, keep CSM on and Secure Boot on and enable UEFI bootup and then remove the - from the EFI folder in the flash drive?

You can always leave UEFI enabled in Unraid, (having the EFI folder), then try booting either way by selecting that option in the BIOS.

If you haven't yet, it's also worth trying to boot with a different flash drive using a stock Unraid itnaill, no key needed, to confirm it's not a flash/config problem.

I was able to check the contents of the current USB drive
- a config directory - which contains the directories of plugins and ssl along with 5 other files
- a .bmp file in the root
- there is no EFI folder at all on this USB drive :/ and this worked for 5 years or so

What do you folks suggest next?

try recreating the flash drive, first backup the current one, then recreate it using the USB tool, confirm the flash drive boots with the stock install, and if yes, restore only the /config folder from the backup overwriting any existing files.

- I created a new USB bootable drive using the creator and I used the latest backup image which I downloaded from unraid dated 31st October 2025 to create a new bootable drive. 
- Had to run the make bootable bat file to make the USB bootable
- It worked, unraid loaded, but then the real bad news
a) All my shares are gone. TBs of data are missing :( , can't locate them in /mnt/ or any other location. 
b) None of my dockers. or plugins were there

c) I saw that all the drives were properly listed, configured and the array was OK. 

I decided to stop the array and also shut down the machine

The array did come up with the proper drive mounting and with zero errors though.

Flash drive issues won't affect array data, unless some data disk was wrongly assigned as parity. You can still try what I suggested: create a stock config then restore only the config folder from the backup, then post the diagnostics.