Well got a new external drive & decided to preclear before shucking. pre-read was going slow, read that moving to usb3.0 port could speed things up. stopped pre-read, moved usb to 3.0 port & got a "your flash drive is damaged or corrupt." message.

I've tried rebooting and couldn't get past the bios. Tried moving flash drive to different USB ports (both 2.0 & 3.0) made sure to unplug all other usb devices (with shut downs in between each move - not trying to hotswap). nadda.

took out flash drive and plugged into windows PC and it shows that drive is unformatted and does not contain a recognizable filesystem.

this thing has been so rock solid I cannot remember if I had backups of my flash drive or config. I want to say that I do, but no idea where they'd be. I did search in the downloads folder of the PC i use the web gui to access my server and did not see any sort of config / backup files/zips.

Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

you have now learned why external drives via USB are not recommended for UNRAID...

(ok, not helpful, but I am afraid you have to restore the backup of your flashdrive to the stick and retry. Hopefully you have a backup, else you have to regenerate the stick from scratch and restore your license...)

If you have installed UNRAID.net you should be able to find and download a backup of the stick there.

Edited January 16Jan 16 by MAM59

If you don't have a backup this should help: https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/system-administration/maintain-and-update/changing-the-flash-device/#recovering-from-a-failed-flash-device-without-a-backup