My Unraid server, which has been running with no problems for a couple of years, is now failing to boot up.

 

A few days ago I noticed that one of the data drives had the red ball next to it, so I took a look at it (short and long SMART tests, and so forth).  I concluded that the drive should be replaced, so I went out and bought a 2TB WD Caviar Green drive (the drive being replaced is a 1.5TB Caviar Green) and swapped it in.  Now the system will not boot.  (I am using the same HP boot USB stick as before.)

 

The system will POST, but after POST I just get a blinking cursor -- no error message of any kind.  However, if I disable all boot devices except the USB drive, then I get a message "device does not contain valid boot media" (I don't recall the exact wording, but that is close).

 

Does anyone have any advice as to how to troubleshoot this problem?  I have already gone through the BIOS settings for how the USB drive is configured (Forced FDD, Hard Disk, etc) and none of the settings works.

 

Here is my setup:

 

SuperMicro SC743i 4U case/650W PSU

ASUS M4A78LT-M LE m/b

AMD Sempron 140 CPU

2GB RAM

2TB WD Caviar Green parity drive

1 x 2.0 TB WD Caviar Green data drive

2 x 1.5TB WD Caviar Green data drives

1 x 1.5TB Hitachi data drive

4GB HP v 125w USB stick

UNRAID v4.7 Pro

 

Any advice more experienced Unraid folks can offer would be very much appreciated.

Remove the Flash dive from the unRAID system.  Insert it into a Windows computer and run chkdsk on the flash drive.

Big chance that your bios changed itself and is now trying to boot from a harddisk... attach a monitor and keyboard and double check that...

 

 

That would be my first guess, could have a failing bios battery. It's either that or the USB drive is on its way out.

Thanks to all for your advice and suggestions.  I've made a bit of progress and would like to ask one more question.

 

It's either that or the USB drive is on its way out.

 

 

It would appear that the USB drive is at fault.  I tried to boot another computer from my unRAID USB drive and it failed with the same error message as before.  Either the USB drive is failing, or it has simply lost its MBR.

 

What I propose to do is to create a new boot USB with unRAID v4.7 (same version as I have been using), and then copy the configuration files (that define the configuration of the drive array) from a backup of the old USB drive.  Is this a good thing to do (i.e. will it work)?  What I want to do is to restore the server exactly as it was when the USB drive failed, because it had a failed data drive which needs to be re-built onto a new data drive.  So I do not want to "start from scratch" and add parity and data drives as if they were new (that would destroy my data).

 

I could just try to re-create the MBR on the existing USB drive and boot from that, but since I do not know how badly the USB drive is damaged I hesitate to do that.  (Although it did pass CHKDSK with no errors, so maybe it's basically OK.)

 

Any thoughts from anyone on how I should proceed from here, to get my server back with the data intact?

 

If you want to use a new USB stick then you will need to get a new unRAID license key as the key is tied to a particular USB drive.    I believe that normally you can get issued a new key free of charge if you contact support explaining the situation, and following the steps you then get advised to take.

I would copy all of the config files from the USB, format it, and reinstall unRAID with your previous config files. At this point you may be good to go...

SHOULD you need to go for a new usb stick, then try and go for one that has a microsd card inserted, that way should this happen again you can change the microsd without needing a new license key ..