I started off my unRaid server build straight from 6.1.9 I believe in April of 2016. The server chugged along happily all of last year until December when I tried to upgrade it to the latest 6.2.xx series at the time via the "Check for Updates" button on the Plugins page. I had read in the release notes that said this is the preferred way to upgrade. However, when it upgrades and then requires a reboot, my system will not boot back up. It is reading my usb drive and booting off of it just fine, because I can watch the lines of code loading until it gets to "unpacking initramfs" and then the screen goes black, so I am unable to see what happens next. The server stays powered on, but I am unable to access the Tower/Dashboard page, or directly access the server via its IP address. I am also unable to access my Windows share drives I had mapped to it.

 

Therefore, I rolled back by copying the files in the "previous" folder on the usb drive back to the root, and the server will boot just fine back into 6.1.9. I recently discovered the original release notes from the 6.2.0 release, linking to these upgrade instructions: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_6_2/Upgrade_Instructions. I have followed these instructions and it is unable to download the 6.2.0 release from the S3 Amazon server, perhaps because it is not hosted there anymore after these past several months since it was released. Is there somewhere else I should be linking to try to update to 6.2.0?? Or ideally should I be able to use the "Check for Updates" button and go straight to the latest 6.3.2 from 6.1.9?? I am unclear whether that is possible, the preferred method, or if you need to update to 6.2.0 first before upgrading further.

 

It seems there is a lot of helpful information out there, and I have done my best to search and follow the posted instructions, but am still running into issues upgrading. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

I recently upgraded to 6.2.4 from v5 so I have not personally used the unRAID OS upgrade feature/plugin yet.  Maybe someone with more experience can weigh-in with their thoughts.  You can download the current and a couple history versions here: https://lime-technology.com/download/ perhaps try to upgrade manually?  The oldest downloadable version available is 6.2.4. There are no prerequisite versions needed to upgrade.  You can go from 6.1.9 to 6.3.2.  Make sure you have backed up your flash stick so you can revert back if it doesn't work.  You could also try installing to a spare flash stick first just to see if it will boot, then try your existing. 

As he said, you don't need 6.2.0, you can go straight to the latest, currently 6.3.2.

 

The upgrade to 6.2 (or later) did have some special quirks, some of which you have read about, but the rest I put into the Additional Upgrade Advice, which may help you.  In particular, I'm wondering how much RAM you have, because recent upgrades have grown large enough that they may take up too much RAM when unzipped into RAM, the way the plugin update method works.  If you have only 1GB, you'll have to upgrade the old manual way, by extracting the bz* files to the boot drive.  There's a section in the upgrade notes about that.

Thanks for the replies. I have 8GB of RAM, so I don't think that is the issue. I like the suggestion of trying to boot it straight to 6.3.2 using a spare flash drive. That would at least help me trouble shoot if it is a quirky BIOS issue not allowing it to boot the new version or if something is going wrong in the upgrade process on my existing flash drive. Just out of curiosity, if I boot into GUI mode with my currently non-functional upgraded 6.3.2 flash drive, would there be anything there that might help me troubleshoot? I'm just not sure what to look for. Thanks again.

3 hours ago, tvince0913 said:

if I boot into GUI mode with my currently non-functional upgraded 6.3.2 flash drive

 

Well, that's the problem, if it's non-functional you can't boot it.  If you can boot it, in any mode, it's functional.  However we have seen a few motherboard cases recently where you can boot into the bootGUI mode but not the console mode.  So do try it.

I guess I mean more in the sense of booting it up, where the machine physically powers on and attempts to boot into UnRaid, but then I am unable to access it remotely for whatever reason in the new configuration. I thought I might be able to boot into the GUI to access it locally in that case. We'll see...

Did you go through the networking sections of the Additional Upgrade Advice?  There were some significant changes made.  And once you can access it over the network, there's a sticky in this board for 'Windows issues' that *might* help.

Oh I see, I was unaware of the significant changes. Well my motherboard only has one NIC, so it should already be eth0 I would think. Would setting the "Enable Bridging" to yes help anything? Or with a single NIC would it not matter? Otherwise, the only other suggestion I see that I could try is to remove the plugins one at a time and see if any of them are affecting the networking at all.

** meant to say "Enable Bonding" **

With only one NIC, you're unlikely to have network issues, so that's almost certainly not the problem.  Don't bother with bonding, no point in bridging either yet, may help later when the system is operational.

 

If you don't already, make sure you have a complete backup of your boot drive, just in case.  Then using either this boot drive, or another one, prepare a fresh boot drive with either 6.3.2 or 6.2.4 from the Lime Technology download page.  Use the instructions on their Getting Started page.  I'd try with 6.3.2 first, if it doesn't boot, then repeat with 6.2.4.

 

Once you can boot with either, before copying your own config to it, type diagnostics at the command prompt, and diagnostics.zip will be saved to the logs folder of your boot drive, where you can access it and post it here.

 

If that worked, then you can make sure your usual boot drive is prepared, and try restoring from your backup your config folder to it, and see if that boots ...