Hi there! I had been running unRaid 5.0 on ESXi 5.5 for years. A few days ago, I decided I needed to update to unRaid 6. So, I changed from booting into unRaid via vmdk to plop. I then upgraded unRaid to 6.7, installed plugins and a new drive that is in the middle of preclearing.  It's all been going great until now.

 

The web gui only displays the header. Searching around, I found this can happen if the USB drive goes bad or is missing. So, I checked the vm's settings in vSphere and sure enough the USB device is not listed. The controller is still listed, but not my unRaid Flash drive.

 

So, what do I do now? Is there anyway to get the flash drive passed back through without shutting down unRaid? unRaid is running in memory, right? So, preclear should still be running? If I shutdown unRaid, will preclear have to start over? Is there anyway to get the status of preclear in a telnet session?

 

Sorry, lots of questions, just not sure how to proceed...

 

Thanks

 

So, I was going to be patient and wait for some responses. I went to watch a show and Kodi would play for 10 seconds and stop. I tried on my laptop and VLC couldn't play any video files. I tried to copy a file to my laptop and that failed too!

 

So, the flash being borked was obviously a bigger deal than I thought. I telneted in and ran powerdown. I removed the flash drive and put in the laptop. It worked and I made a backup. Put flash back into ESXi server and powered up unRaid. It came up and started a parity check. So, I don't think I shut it down cleanly. Stopped the parity check and started the preclear. It's resuming from where it was. Yes! And I can watch videos again.

 

All is great now except that I don't know why I lost the flash drive from the vm. Probably has something to do with this:

 

From log, this keeps repeating:

Jun 14 15:37:52 unRaid5 kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 15237120 512-byte logical blocks: (7.80 GB/7.27 GiB)
Jun 14 15:37:53 unRaid5 rc.diskinfo[5970]: SIGHUP received, forcing refresh of disks info.
Jun 14 15:38:32 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: reset high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
Jun 14 15:38:38 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Jun 14 15:38:54 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Jun 14 15:38:54 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: reset high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
Jun 14 15:39:00 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Jun 14 15:39:16 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Jun 14 15:39:16 unRaid5 kernel: usb 1-2.1: reset high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd

 

I was typing away a response when your second post came in... So, scratch that one, obsolete 🙂

The errors you see seem to be coming from the preclear plugin and it seems to have caused a reset on the (v-) USB controller, leading to a virtual eject. 

 

In general Unraid indeed runs mostly from RAM but it is dependent on the flash drive to be there - e.g. it is mounted as /boot for permanent storage, etc.

 

i have had some cases on my ESXi, when all connected USB's simply disappeared from system, including ESXi host boot USB. in such cases just a full ESXi reboot will bring them up again, and then they will work for months again..