My unraid server won't boot.

 

I plugged in a keyboard and monitor, and it is getting past the BIOS post, and starts booting unraid, but then freezes/halts before getting to the login screen.

I have re-booted many times, and I have re-seated all power and sata cables. 

The bios is reading all drives present.

 

I have attached 2 photos, the one with the black background shows the screen where it freezes every time except for once which is the error screen with the red background, it stopped at this screen one time.

 

Since you got the red screen of death, the first thing that I would check is to run a memtest for a while (ideally 24 hours, but at least a couple of passes)

 

Also maybe flash drive corruption. Are you still running 6b15 as your sig says. Latest v6 has automatic fsck for the flash drive.

 

Put it in your PC and let it checkdisk.

This is my secondary server, not the one listed in my signature sorry about that!  It is on one of the 6 betas but I can't confirm the exact version without booting

 

I put the USB stick in my computer, and it read the drive but it took me multiple tries to successfully make a local backup of the contents, it failed a few times trying to copy bzroot.  I did get a successful copy though.  If I manually copy bzroot over, rather than taking all the files at once, it works.

 

I right-clicked on the drive and when to tools the error-checking then check now, and windows reported the disk was successfully scanned with no errors.

 

I don't know how to run checkdisk unless that is what I already ran in windows?

After re-installing the USB key in ther server, and running a loop of memtest, the server booted fine.

 

This is the second time I have been stuck with a non-booting server, and through my "testing" it randomly gets fixed.

 

Any ideas what might be causing this, its such a pain each time it happens.

Try a different USB port.  IE: if you're currently in USB3, put it into a USB2 and vice versa

I tried three different ports, and none of them booted.

 

Tonight, I used the same port as I always do, and it booted.  So it doesn't seem to be usb port related.

Set the stick up again from scratch.  Make sure you save your key file

I have to upgrade from 5.0 rc8a to current anyways, I am just looking up the upgrade instructions but I think it more or less builds it from scratch for that upgrade?

 

 

IIRC, the instructions in the wiki for upgrading are basically from scratch.  Using the plugin method is not.

Thank you, I just finished my backups (flash + various screenshots), just starting the "perform the upgrade" portion of the wiki.

 

Thanks again for the help.

I tried a reboot and I am back at square 1, it stops booting at the exact same spot as in the attached picture in the first post, with the black background.

 

Should I proceed with the upgrade and see if that resolves it?

It boots once in a while.  The last time you just pulled the stick and effectively reinserted it.

 

Either something's strange on the data stored on the stick, or the stick itself is faulty (or the mobo is flakey).  Try doing the stick again and go from there.  I would do the stick completely from scratch (just save the key (licence) file.  If you're going to upgrade to v6, effectively you're doing the same thing anyways.

 

Make a big note as to what your parity drive is also.

Ok, proceeding with upgrade which will basically redo the stick.

 

Will report back when complete, thanks!