My unraid server is having severe issues. It began a month or two ago with the system randomly crashing / hanging up with few or no log messages about what was going on. I did catch a few log errors of some sort of CPU failure as I was trying to diagnose. It got to the point where the server would die within minutes of a restart.

Now, the server will not boot at all. It gets to the point where it is mounting something to /lib and then simply hangs.

I'm half in the camp that there is a hardware issue & I just need to build a new system, and half in the camp that my unraid thumb drive is buggered and I need to refresh the underlying code. This issue started after a big update was applied, but that could be coincidence.

Any suggestions on how to better diagnose? Or, how to refresh the thumb drive without losing all my custom configs??

Try booting with a different flash drive using a stock install, no key needed; that will confirm whether it's a config issue or not.

That is so obviously the first step that it pains me to not have thought of it myself. Thank you.

The system immediately booted from the fresh thumb drive.

So now I need to figure out how to update my existing thumb drive without losing all the config info.

I have found that the original flash drive has two fsck000x.rec files on it -- this is no doubt the root of my problems. I would like to:

1) reformat the original thumb drive...

2) and then copy the system files from the new thumb drive

3) and the config files from the backup I just took of the original thumb drive.

4) And finally run the make bootable utility on the original thumb drive.

Will this just magically work? Will the GUID of the original thumb drive survive the reformat?

First 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.

If it doesn't boot after restoring the complete /config, recreate it again using the USB tool and just restore the bare minimum, like the key, super.dat and the pools folder for the assignments, also copy the docker user templates folder (\config\plugins\dockerMan\templates-user), if all works you can then reconfigure the server or try restoring a few config files at a time from the backup to see if you can find the culprit.