Corrupted USB?

[visage]

So I bouned my server last night...and it wouldnt come back.

 

So I connected it to a monitor to see what was happening during startup, and it just gets to a blinking cursor and thats it. Ive double checked all the BIOS options and its correctly set to boot from USB.

 

SO I took the USB key and put it in a windows machine and it says the drive is corrupted....in disk manager its listed as a RAW format.

 

So its broken, right?

 

I have a backup from the 5th June - can I just get a new usb stick, follow the setup steps and then just copy the backup back to it?

[visage]

... or is this natures way of telling me to just upgrade to v6?

[itimpi]

If you try to use a different USB stick then you will have to get a new key file as the key is tied to the GUID of the USB stick.  It may be sufficient to let Windows try and fix the current issues.    failing that you may be better of trying first by formatting the current USB stick and seeing if you can go from there.

 

In terms of the backup, then if you have not made any changes to the drives then using your current backup should be OK.  If any drives have changed since that backup then it is not that simple and you need to take extra steps to avoid potential data loss.

 

Upgrading to v6 may be a sensible way forward if your hardware is up to it.

[visage]

Thanks for your reply.

 

Looking at various wiki pages It seems that I should be able to just follow the unraid 6 clean install instructions, using the key file from my old installation, and then when prompted request a new key.

 

In terms of restoring the array, ive got 4 data drives + parity - my understanding is that the parity drive will show as 'unformatted', so just assigning the others as data drives and that one as parity will see the array working (albeit probably needing a parity check...)

 

Then i'll just need to install the unraid 6 verions of the apps I use.

 

Does that sound right?

 

Thanks!

[JonathanM]

In terms of restoring the array, ive got 4 data drives + parity - my understanding is that the parity drive will show as 'unformatted', so just assigning the others as data drives and that one as parity will see the array working (albeit probably needing a parity check...)

 

Does that sound right?

Close. If the stars align, your data drives will all show up without extra effort. But, it's possible that V6 won't detect the correct format on some or all of your drives, so don't panic if you see more than one unmountable drive. Manually set the format type to match your drives, if you still show multiple unmountable post diagnostics and ask for help. If you know for sure your parity is correct or very close, then you can select the option to tell unraid that parity is already valid, then do a correcting check. If you think parity might be badly out of sync, and you are sure your data drives are healthy, a fresh parity build followed by a check may be faster.

 

That said, now may be a good time to source a new larger parity drive and start the migration process to a more modern file system. ReiserFS has fallen out of favor for large very full drives, XFS is what's recommended now. If you get a new drive, you can use your old parity drive as the freshly formatted XFS drive to start the copy process to move your data. There is no option to convert file systems in place on unraid, you must copy from drive to drive and format the drives as you get the files moved.