One promblem after another, now my Boot drive is not read-write.

[yoshi68]

Hi, I was trying to configure VMs on a non parity protected drive. I asked the other day if there was a way to do this and I was pointed towards the App "Unassigned Devices". I pulled one disk out of my array, and recalculated parity, I added the unassigned disk to the Unassigned Devices list.

 

I created a user share on it called VM, when I hit save, I got an error that the share was deleted. Researching this on the forum, I came across someone saying that I should restart the server after a fresh parity check and this would be solved, It was. Then I tried to create a VM, and I got an error, When I tried to restart the server again, I had an error with "Retry unmounting user share(s)" over and over, I found a thread where people said just to hard reset and check the USB boot drive for errors with chkdsk in Windows. I did that and all has come up OK. but now when I boot to UNRAID, I get this error "Alert [TOWER] - USB drive is not read-write".

 

Now I can't change any settings because all of the configs are on a read only drive. I have attached my diagnostics zip file.

tower-diagnostics-20160622-0037.zip

[testdasi]

Your procedure seems very strange to be honest.

 

I thought it's just (1) mount the unassigned device (2) create a folder for the VM vdisk (3) configure the VM to point the VM setup vdisk file setup to the folder created in step 2 (4) save and start VM

 

Not sure if it's actually possible to create a share on an Unassigned Device so maybe that's why you have the errors.

[trurl]

You can SMB share a disk mounted with Unassigned Devices. What this has to do with VMs local to your unRAID server I can't imagine.

 

Also can't imagine what all that stuff about parity checks and reboots have to do with any of this. Parity in particular cannot have anything to do with Unassigned Devices.

 

Maybe if the OP could give us a link to the confusing advice they are following.

[yoshi68]

Ill get onto that tonight when I get home from work.

 

I am trying to have my VMs not parity protected. My plan was

4TB parity

  -4TB data

  -4TB data

  -2TB data

  -2TB data

 

1TB data

 

Using the Unassigned Devices app, you can still mount the unassigned devices and create user shares on them, but they are not parity protected. I mounted the drive, I added a share on it (that I will use to share info between my VMs and not touch the rest of my shares parity protected shares). Once it was mounted, I could choose that disk as a VM location, but it wouldn't install. 

 

I don't think the parity scan has anything to do what problems I am having now, I was just listing out my procedures. I correctly removed a data disk from my parity protected array before doing what I suspect led me to this problem

[testdasi]

Have you tried pointing the vdisk location to

/mnt/disks/[name of your unassigned device]/[name of folder you created]?

 

And what file system is on your unassigned device?

[yoshi68]

The reason why I can't install a VM is just because my boot drive is mounting as read only. It is perfectly fine in another computer (Ubuntu or Windows).

 

The file that cannot be written is in /etc/ so it is just a problem with writing the configurations to allow the VM to be created.

 

I'll look into just a reinstall of the OS I think. just work out the safest way to approach it before I do.

[gubbgnutten]

The reason why I can't install a VM is just because my boot drive is mounting as read only. It is perfectly fine in another computer (Ubuntu or Windows).

 

The file that cannot be written is in /etc/ so it is just a problem with writing the configurations to allow the VM to be created.

 

I'll look into just a reinstall of the OS I think. just work out the safest way to approach it before I do.

 

Well, USB boot device is not actually mounting read-only according to the diagnostics, but the file system is set read-only later in the start sequence when it encounters an error in the file system. Unless you tried to access the corresponding data in Ubuntu/Windows, the "perfectly fine" assessment might be unfounded. 

 

In any case, the file system needs to be fixed, either through repair (if repairable) or by making a new one.

[yoshi68]

As I am far more familiar with diagnosing Windows environment problems, I took the easy route out this time and copied all of my configurations, made notes on all settings, reinstalled and set all up again. Everything went 100% smoothly as far as that went, and I already have my VM up and running.

 

Thanks for attempting to help with it everyone who did.