Three times now I have reformatted a single drive that's in its own pool (as encrypted zfs) because it has randomly come up as Unmountable: wrong or no file system. And it just did it again. It's a new drive, there are no SMART errors. How can I force it to mount correctly? How do I prevent this from happening? This most recent occurrence appears to have happened after a hard shutdown of (loss of power to) the server.

I also noticed that after this hard shutdown the root user's authorized SSH keys were wiped, when before I had no issues with it retaining the keys.

metaverse-diagnostics-20261002-1002.zip

Edited 15 hours ago15 hr by gusgus

Do not format the drive again. Your diagnostics show these errors before the filesystem mount attempt:

No key available with this passphrase.

hdd: Wrong encryption key

The HDD remains locked, so ZFS cannot read the filesystem inside it. This explains the later “wrong or no file system” message.

The same supplied key successfully unlocks your NVMe pool. Was the HDD formatted with the same passphrase or key file? Do you enter it manually after startup, or does a script or plugin supply it automatically? Unraid expects one shared key for all encrypted drives.

Please describe how you supply the key, but do not post the passphrase or key file. If you are certain the original credential is unchanged, we can investigate why the HDD rejects it. The diagnostics do not yet establish that power loss damaged the filesystem.

If you use the exact same passphrase or key file and it sometimes works but sometimes fails, an intermittent hardware problem, such as faulty RAM, is another possibility. I have seen that cause this behavior before. In that situation, a memory test would be a useful next step.

The odd part is I have two pools, both formatted as encrypted zfs. They both have the same encryption passphrase. The other pool that I'm not having this problem with is unlocking just fine at bootup as expected. Why would one pool unlock perfectly fine using the keyfile and another pool repeatedly but only occasionally fail to unlock using that same keyfile? Is this still possibly a memory corruption issue? Unless I'm missing something, I would think it's time to file a bug report.

Edited 15 hours ago15 hr by gusgus

9 minutes ago, gusgus said:

Is this still possibly a memory corruption issue?

Most definitely, or another hardware issue.

If it were an unload issue not giving the correct key, both pools would fail to unlock.