stuck at "Syncing File system..." on new USB setup?


jpotrz

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  • 2 weeks later...
16 hours ago, Davin S said:

Out of 4 drives, I've only had it work on 1.  Stuck at that same point when using both 4GB and 8GB Sandisk Cruze Blade, plus a Kingston 8GB drive.  So far only worked on a Strontium.  Manual creation worked on the Kingston, but didn't try it on the Sandisks

If you quit waiting and just yank the device, does it boot in a server?

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10 hours ago, limetech said:

If you quit waiting and just yank the device, does it boot in a server?

I didn't try that, but I have reason to think it wouldn't.  Windows Explorer was still showing the USB drives as empty when I eventually quit the setup.

 

Update: as expected, no it doesn't boot, with 100% free space on the drive.  After yanking the USB, the creator is still stuck on 'Syncing file system", although the cancel button and the Selct USB  dropdown are now greyed out.

Edited by Davin S
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  • 1 month later...

Just to chime in, I just tried the tool on both a verbatim and a kingston USB device, 4 and 16 gigs respectively.

Both failed.

The Verbatim one even had weird chinese character write errors.

Formatted it manually, named it UNRAID & ran the manual setup, worked without a hitch on the Verbatim that I actually wanted to use.

The download page needs some work, as there are no instructions available for the manual setup... and as it stands, it kinda feels like the "tool" offering is causing more of a problem than a benefit to new people.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 10/7/2019 at 6:57 PM, KazeNoTachi said:

Confirmed That renaming the drive while it's stuck at "syncing the filesystem" worked for me. It "unstuck" immediately. Crucial 4GB gizmo.

I did the same thing on a kingston data traveler 2.0 usb and it also immediately started to extracted the files.  It moves to the 90% in 6 seconds and stayed there.  Just when I was about to give up it's telling me it's done.  Then I looked at the drive.  It seemed ok (but I'm a newbee what do I know right?).  Anyway, I pulled up the properties for it and noticed that it only had 7.2gb of capacity instead of 14gb+ for this 16gb drive.  So the unraid utility has issues with 16GB drives.

 

So then I popped out the kingston and plugged it back in to my win 10 pc.  Ran the make bootable bat file to see if it would boot.  Nope...that didn't work either.

 

So then I formatted the drive as fat32.  Copied the files manually from the zip, then ran the make bootable bat file.  Transfered the usb drive to the unraid server and this worked.

2020-01-26 15_10_13-.jpg

2020-01-26 15_12_51-File Explorer.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

These are additional notes in line with tr3bjockey's observations, and expanding on what I think the failing mechanism is.

 

16gb USB2 data traveler by Kingston, stuck on synching. While I was waiting I plugged in another already configured UNRAID usb flash drive to look at the file structure -- and the flash drive creator tool immediate saw the old already named and configured UNRAID flash drive appear and overwrote it with a new installation (this was disappointing as it had been the configured installation of a trial).

 

I removed my old UNRAID flash drive that had just been overwritten by the creator utility, and tried running the creator utility again. It again hung on synching, so I tried renaming the flash drive UNRAID (it was called something generic like "USB Drive") and the utility immediately saw it and completed.

 

So .. it appears that the flash drive creator is programmed to rename the flash drive to UNRAID and then to continue working on whatever drive is called UNRAID. For some drives, perhaps some that don't have a name it understands, it fails to rename it and therefore waits forever for an UNRAID drive to appear --- unless you rename it yourself.

 

Also -- It gave my 16gb drive a single partition of 8gb. My understanding is that this doesn't really matter as the space needs are unlikely to exceed a few megabytes, but it is still disappointing. I would imagine doing a manual install would fix this as well.

 

The irony is that I chose this drive as I believed it was one of annointed (recommended) ones. I could have had a larger and faster (USB3) drive for about the same price, but I was trying to play it safe. Hopefully it will be rock solid going forward. I'm hoping the metal construction and its size (small but not too small) will mean it won't get too hot or burn out early.

Edited by midofru
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 10/7/2019 at 7:57 PM, KazeNoTachi said:

Confirmed That renaming the drive while it's stuck at "syncing the filesystem" worked for me. It "unstuck" immediately. Crucial 4GB gizmo.

Confirmed this also worked for my SanDisk FIT 16GB USB2 drive.  Renaming to "unraid" through file explorer _while_ the tool is stuck at "syncing the filesystem" allowed the deployment to continue.  Anecdotally this seems to relate to >8GB drives.  All of my other drives worked fine, but this is the first >8GB drive I've deployed to.

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Wow, this thread started in february 2018 and this is still an issue. 
I have the exact same issue with my Sandisk and Kingston usb drives. 
Stuck at syncing filesystem. 
The manual way works, to copy the files and run the make_bootable.bat, but why isn't this issue fixed by Limetech??
This bug is over 2 years old and will probably scare new users away.

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20 minutes ago, widdefmh said:

Stuck at syncing filesystem. 

Sync is a built-in command in any linux system.  What it does is flush out all the writes to all the drives / devices attached to a system.  (Basically the same thing as ejecting a flash drive in Windows).  If another process though happens to be holding writes to a device, then the sync will keep trying, trying ad naseum.  (IE: Running a preclear at the same time as when it tries to sync will result in the sync never finishing until the preclear is finished)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/21/2019 at 4:47 PM, raerae1616 said:

This is still definitely an issue.  I have been testing Unraid via the Trial on an old USB stick for a few days while I build my new Unraid server.... ordered a new Sandisk Cruzer (Sandisk 32GB Cruzer Fit USB 2.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ33-032G-G35), and when trying to write the ZIP backkup of my original Unraid USB (backed up via Web UI) I consistently got the very same result with it immediately freezing with status "syncing file system".  After attempting some of the workarounds here I did get it to write by manually formatting & renaming the USB drive name while it showed the error "syncing file system", to which the USB installer would resume and appear to complete, but only ~7GB of the 32GB was shown as being formatted, and needless to say it wasn't bootable.

 

The only thing that finaly worked was the completely manual process from the Unraid site (https://wiki.unraid.net/UnRAID_6/Changing_The_Flash_Device#Legacy_method_-_Windows_and_MacOS), which took 2-3 repeated attempts before I finally ran the "make_bootable.bat" file correclty; it didn't work from Admin command prompt, but it did work successfully when I right clicked and ran "as Administrator" directly from Explorer.

 

So, thankfully eventually the manual process worked and now boots without an issue . . . And, I'm super impressed with Unraid overall, but there is definitely a problem with the USB bootable installer for migrating/restoring, which would have been absolutely wonderful if it had worked.

Have this exact issue, where the tool stops processing, and resizes the drive to ~7Gb, as others have seen. I ensured the drive was labelled "UNRAID", tried changing the block size allocation, running as admin, a many other options. None worked.

 

What did work, as others noted, is when the Flash Creator hangs with "syncing the filesystem", open a new Explorer window, and rename the USB drive back to UNRAID. It seems like the Flash Creator tries to rename the drive and fails for some reason.

 

This is a very common issue apparently, and has been around for 2+ years. It's pretty off putting and doesn't exactly inspire confidence. However, rest of the trial has gone pretty well so far, so faith is not entirely lost!

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On 3/28/2020 at 8:55 PM, Dan P said:

I had the same issue and the fix is to run the USB Creator as administrator.  This will allow the tool to rename the USB drive.

This also seems to work to get the image loaded. In my case I still can't boot, but that's probably separate as I couldn't boot using the "rename" method either.

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  • 5 weeks later...
On 3/15/2020 at 9:50 AM, The_N4RF said:

Confirmed this also worked for my SanDisk FIT 16GB USB2 drive.  Renaming to "unraid" through file explorer _while_ the tool is stuck at "syncing the filesystem" allowed the deployment to continue.  Anecdotally this seems to relate to >8GB drives.  All of my other drives worked fine, but this is the first >8GB drive I've deployed to.

Holy crap.  This actually worked.  I was stuck on "syncing file system", i right clicked on the drive in windows, hit "rename" (while it was still stuck on syncing) and changed it to "UNRIAD" i saw the drive started to populate and it said DONE!  Thanks!  I was pulling my hair out!

Edited by danimal86
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  • 4 weeks later...
1 hour ago, Froberg said:

I really fear this is causing a hindrance for some people who are new to UnRaid.

It 100% is for myself, I have watched probably 20 space invader vids and read many pages on the forum (probably overkill in terms of newbie) and just feel I have spent more time trying to get the flash stick set up correctly then using unraid itself.

 

Even with the above hackery to rename to UNRAID it did not work for me, but then I noticed it is my fault or the unraid wiki is not fully clear, the Manual method of creating the unraid stick (copying over the zip etc) only works if you are in legacy bios mode, my bios does not have any legacy mode written anywhere but then I found its also known as CSM. So I disabeled CSM and the stick boots fine. The only issue is I can't have CSM enabled since when I pass through my GPU on my VM I discovered I get the dreaded Code 43 gpu fault but switching off CSM in bios my gpu can pass through the nvidia card fully without error (I will update the code43 thread with my findings may help others)

 

So I still remembered others on here used a old pc, tried it on a 10 year pc and unraid creator created it perfectly on a sandisk usb stick and the corsair!

 

So only took 3-4 weeks to fully get a usb stick running. I also read usb2.0 flash are more reliable but I used a magazine freebie one and while it passed multi write read/write test, I think its a dodgy stick maybe the cheap or free ones are a reason ! so ill digress and say cough up get a good quality flash drive.

 

Its perhaps a bit of old guides getting out of date, seems UEFI, Legacy/CSM and usb3.0 flash are also problematic, maybe its better to flash on an stick on an usb 2.0 port on a 10 year old computer.

 

Really at this point I just want to see if unraid is stable enough to move full time, which I believe it is.

 

 

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13 minutes ago, HectorG said:

Really at this point I just want to see if unraid is stable enough to move full time, which I believe it is.

Flash stick creation aside, it's entirely likely you'll never want to use anything else ever again. (famous last words)

I even have two licenses now. I have tried everything else out there. UnRaid, by and large, just works.

 

As for USB. 2.0 is basically required, as is a low capacity drive like 2-8GB in size as preferred.

Quality drive, too.

 

Other than that, yes, they really need to fix this utility.

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