Hi all,

I want to apologize in advance if this has already been covered.

First of all, a little about my setup.....

 

I have been running Unraid for many years now. Zero issues. I love it. I use it mainly for backing up information from various computers, media server, VM's. I was running all of this on a very basic system. However, I have recently updated my main PC, so I decided to move the CPU, RAM from my old gaming PC to the Unraid setup. This required that I replace the MB, as the socket type wasn't the same as I had been using on my previous Unraid setup. The problem (which I only found out after assembling the new computer) is that the replacement MB does not have a VGA out. 

 

The MB I chose was this... Asrock X99E-ITX/ac. I chose this as it was the only one I could get my hands on, with a 2011V3 socket. It has 1 expansion slot, which I use with a SATA expansion card, as I needed more than the MB has. 

 

I am fortunate that I have a VGA ribbon, so I disconnected the SATA card, and plugged in the rbbon, which I then attached my a graphics card I had lying about. All good. I entered the BIOS. I set all the things I needed and hit the save and exit. At this point I left the GPU connected to make sure all was well with the boot. The system rebooted fine and I got the Unraid boot loader. I let it go through to the headless boot, and it booted to the login prompt. 

 

At this point, I went to my Ubiquiti setup to see what IP address the server had been given. Previously I had given it a static IP address so I could access it anytime without needing to find out it's location. Here's where it all got hard for my knowledge.....

 

No matter what I tried, I could not access the web gui. I tried typing the IP address that I saw on both the Unraid login prompt (The one stated above.. IP4), and the one I got from my Unifi Setup. Nothing gave me a chance to login. 

 

I did some reading on the forums and I saw some people were questioning how the Unraid server was connected, through switches etc. Mine was in fact at this point connected through 2 switches, as I was trying to test it in the living room before moving it to the study where it lives. Didn't change a thing. 

 

So my issues are these.... 

1. How can I access the GUI? Does my previous USB Drive need to be updated???

2. With this board having no VGA out, is there a way to force a USB boot, OTHER than the BIOS to boot to it. The reason I ask this is, as soon as I plug in the other SATA drives, the BIOS seems to change to these drives. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I know we have some incredible minds on these forums. Thanking you in advance...

Morten

 

Connect a monitor and keyboard to the server.  If the server has booted up you should see a login prompt.  Login in as  root  using the password that you would use with the GUI.  At the command line prompt, type

diagnostics

That will assemble the Diagnostics file and write it to the flash drive in the logs folder/directory of the flash drive.  Shut the server down with this command:

poweroff

Remove the Flash Drive and, put it in your PC and upload the file in a new post.

Thanks Frank, I'll sort that asap. Just cooking dinner atm. 

Be right back.... with that file. Thanks for the swift reply. 

OK... so not a great result. Frank, I did as you mentioned above and I got the following screen. 

Also, NO log file was produced. I have included 2 pictures. 1 from the server after I typed Diagnostics, and the second is from the USB after I removed it to find the log file. 

2 hours ago, mort78 said:

I have included 2 pictures. 1 from the server after I typed Diagnostics, and the second is from the USB after I removed it to find the log file. 

The first picture with the file listing of your flash Drive shows that you have some serious issues with it.  The files and directories that begin with a <dot> (.) should not be there.  (It appears from the dates involved that you attempted to update your Unraid version and it failed...) I would suggest that you pull it, make a copy of its contents, and run chkdsk on it. 

The files beginning with a dot were placed there by a computer running macOS. They are harmless. The lack of a logs folder suggests the flash device is corrupt.

Hi guys,

Many thanks for the replies. 

Hmmmm, this is interesting, As it's been working flawlessly since day one. All I've done in the meantime, was to stop the array, then a shutdown. 

So basically, something weird has happened the moment I put it into the new build.

 

Chkdsk found no problems. Should I make a new USB drive for Unraid? 

 

Many thanks,

Morten 

So I think I'll start fresh. I read on the Unraid documentation that I need to make sure that the drives are registered in the same sequence it was located beforehand. I have pulled all the drives out, on the rebuild, so I have no idea which drive was where.... The documentation says to report here to find out how to do that....

 

So my question now is... How do I do that

 

Many thanks all.

Kind regards,

Morten

Also, just confirming that all the data on these drives will be intact? All I'm trying to do is to make a new USB, and then continue where I left off.

 

9 hours ago, mort78 said:

I need to make sure that the drives are registered in the same sequence it was located beforehand. I have pulled all the drives out, on the rebuild, so I have no idea which drive was where....

Physical location (which port or cable) makes no difference. It's the assignments to logical slots that matter. Do you have a screenshot of the array before things went south? A status email from notifications? Anything like that? Do you remember how many parity drives you assigned, 1 or 2? Did you assign any drives to cache?

 

All your data will be fine, it's just easier if you can recreate the assignments correctly without trial and error. If you want to start poking around, the only hard and fast rule is do not assign any drives to the parity slots unless you are positive and have verified that those drives are indeed parity. You can assign drives to data slots and no data will be erased unless you select to format them.

Since you have a flash drive without a known file structure problem, you can use the existing   config    folder which contains everything you need to built a clone of your present configuration.  You should have already made a copy of the flash drive.  Built your new flash drive (or reformat the old one and install Unraid on it).  See if it boots up with the GUI.  If it does, shutdown the server without doing anything else, pull the drive,  and copy the config folder from the backup and overwrite everything.   Reinstall the flash drive and start the server. 

Thanks Johnathan and Frank for your replies.

 

Its turned into a right mission this has. If I had known now, the issues I'd be having, I would have left it all alone. 

 

OK, so I made a backup of my current USB device. Remade it using the creator tool. NOTHING. 

Decided to use a NEW USB and left everything in the creator tool as default and BOOM, it worked. So then I took that USB device and copied over the previous config and NOTHING again. 

 

Reformatted the USB again, and I have it working. I tried the config again and again, with no luck. So I reregistered the new USB device, and I'll just set the dockers etc up again. No big deal there. 

 

So, now I'm at the stage of assigning the drives to their locations. All drives showed up as unassigned. I only had 1 PARITY disk, and 1 Cache disk. The rest were data drives. Actually, I added another drive today, as I had 1 lying about. So how do I assign these now??? 

 

Thanks again for the help.

Cheers,

Morten

First, look through the config folder of that backup you made for any file which has 'disk' in it.  (There is a plugin which will make a text file of the disk assignments.) 

 

Second, Assuming that you know the serial number of the parity drive and cache drive (or can figure them out by others means--size, manufacturer model, etc.), the actual assignment position of data drives is immaterial with single parity.  

 

Third, if you can not identify the parity drive, assign all of the disks as data drives and start the array.  There should be one (and only one disk) that is formatted.  That will be the parity drive.

 

2 hours ago, mort78 said:

Actually, I added another drive today, as I had 1 lying about. So how do I assign these now??? 

This is actually a bad thing to do when you have any issue/problem.  Never introduce another variable into a problem until after you have resolved the problem.  If possible, remove it before proceeding any further.  After you are sure everything is working again, then add it.  (Be sure that you double check that you did not loosen any of the SATA connectors while doing the install and removal.  You could actually just pull the SATA data connector off rather then physically removing the the disk.)

Edited November 10, 20196 yr by Frank1940

Hi Frank,

Thanks for the reply.

Had a quick look on my backup. Doesn't seem to be anything there that I can see, in which identifies the disks separately. I might have to do as you suggested in the 3rd step. I can identify the cache and the new drive as they are smaller than the others. 

Good point with regards to adding another drive. I figured it would be ok, as I could identify it immediately and it was smaller than the others. But I'll disconnect it until I have the rest sorted. 

 

I'll let you know how I get on. 

Cheers,

Morten 

OK... All good and I believe I know which is the parity drive. 

But I'll include the picture here, just to confirm. 

 

SDE is the PARITY drive correct?

 

Thanks,
Morten

Edited November 10, 20196 yr by mort78

36 minutes ago, mort78 said:

SDE is the PARITY drive correct?

Yes

37 minutes ago, mort78 said:

SDE is the PARITY drive correct?

At the moment of this screen shot, most likely. DO NOT RELY ON SD? DESIGNATIONS. They can and will change if you move things around.

 

The correct way to designate this is the drive with serial number ending in Z5 is probably your parity drive.

 

The drive ending in 1K, your 3TB drive, are you expecting that to have files on it? Currently it's not mounting, is it the "new" drive that you planned to add? If so, I wouldn't add it until you actually need the space. Extra drives that you aren't using are a liability, as all drives are used to emulate a missing drive. Even empty drives can torpedo a failed drive recovery.

Hi Johnathan,

You're 100% correct in saying that the 3TB drive is in fact the extra drive I decided to throw in. I completely agree with what Frank and yourself have mentioned. I will remove that drive now. As you say, I don't really need the space just yet anyway. No point having further wear and tear on it. 

 

Thank you both very much for all your help. Couldn't have done it without you. You guys rock!!!

Thanks,

Morten