Unraid stuck in a boot loop

[bukweet]

Google searches I did for this did not yield anything that helped. Most issues I found seem to stem from an update. In the search results, people were actually getting some output, where as my system is stuck on a loop in the Unraid boot screen.

 

How it happened:

I had been having some trouble with a vm freezing up on me, so I did a force stop from the Unraid GUI. The GUI went a little wonky for a moment and was displaying what looked like a couple of linux logs. These 'logs' were rendered over the GUI and overlapped each other; like the 'logs' were printed out over on top of one another.

 

I should have taken a screenshot of these phantom logs, but alas, I panicked. The only thing I can remember is that they referred to some lib modules.

 

In my panic, I did a hard shutdown of my computer and upon reboot, the Unraid boot screen was stuck in a loop.

 

What it's doing:

Here is a video of what it is doing --> https://imgur.com/1PebNA1

 

I'll select any of the boot options and the whole thing just starts over. The Memtest works and succeeds.

 

Hitting tab gets me to the cli, but I'm unsure of what to do here and am admittedly a little wary as I reeeeeally don't want to break it more.

 

Hardware:

Ryzen 7 2700x

Asus ROG STRIX X470-F GAMING

32 GB RAM

Nvidia GTX 680

XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC2

 

Please hit me up with any questions. Any help is greatly appreciated and many thanks in advance.

 

 

 

[itimpi]

6 minutes ago, bukweet said:

Google searches I did for this did not yield anything that helped. Most issues I found seem to stem from an update. In the search results, people were actually getting some output, where as my system is stuck on a loop in the Unraid boot screen.

 

How it happened:

I had been having some trouble with a vm freezing up on me, so I did a force stop from the Unraid GUI. The GUI went a little wonky for a moment and was displaying what looked like a couple of linux logs. These 'logs' were rendered over the GUI and overlapped each other; like the 'logs' were printed out over on top of one another.

 

I should have taken a screenshot of these phantom logs, but alas, I panicked. The only thing I can remember is that they referred to some lib modules.

 

In my panic, I did a hard shutdown of my computer and upon reboot, the Unraid boot screen was stuck in a loop.

 

What it's doing:

Here is a video of what it is doing --> https://imgur.com/1PebNA1

 

I'll select any of the boot options and the whole thing just starts over. The Memtest works and succeeds.

 

Hitting tab gets me to the cli, but I'm unsure of what to do here and am admittedly a little wary as I reeeeeally don't want to break it more.

 

Hardware:

Ryzen 7 2700x

Asus ROG STRIX X470-F GAMING

32 GB RAM

Nvidia GTX 680

XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC2

 

Please hit me up with any questions. Any help is greatly appreciated and many thanks in advance.

 

 

 

I would suggest that you put the USB stick into abPC/Mac and check it.     Take the opportunity to make a backup of the current contents. 

 

You can then recreate the USB stick and see if that boots.     If it does then copy the config folder from the backup overwriting the one on the freshly created USB stick to get back all your current settings.

[bukweet]

itimpi,

Awesome! I was just plugging the flash drive into my lap top to check out the logs!

 

I have backed up the entire contents of the drive and will recreate it as you suggest.

 

To be clear, the config unix executable is the only file that the recreated drive will need to restore my previous settings?

 

Heaps of thanks!

[itimpi]

26 minutes ago, bukweet said:

itimpi,

Awesome! I was just plugging the flash drive into my lap top to check out the logs!

 

I have backed up the entire contents of the drive and will recreate it as you suggest.

 

To be clear, the config unix executable is the only file that the recreated drive will need to restore my previous settings?

 

Heaps of thanks!

Config on the flash drive is a folder containing many files/folders, not a file.

[bukweet]

2 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Config on the flash drive is a folder containing many files/folders, not a file.

Uh-oh.

 

These are the only files that were on the flash drive:

 

[itimpi]

14 minutes ago, bukweet said:

Uh-oh.

 

These are the only files that were on the flash drive:

 

That is nowhere near all the files that should be on the flash drive  It sounds as if the flash drive was very badly corrupted and the current configuration information has been wiped.   Do you have a backup of your flash drive elsewhere (e.g. did you have he CA Backup plugin installed) as if not you are going to have to recreate your Unraid settings.  In particular do you have a copy of your *.key type file that was in the config folder and contained your Unraid licence key (if not you will need to contact Limetech to get it resent to you and being a weekend there might be some delay).

 

The good news is that as long as the data drives are intact you can get the array back with its current contents intact.   Do you have any record of your disk assignments as that would make it easier.

 

 

[bukweet]

Well, dang it:(

 

Sadly, there are no back-ups.

 

However, when I purchased unRAID, I was emailed the link to my Unraid Plus registration key file. Upon clicking the link, a Plus.key file is downloaded to my computer.

 

I imagine (hope) that the drives are still intact and just wondering who turned out the lights.

 

As far as disk assignments go, I was digging around in the diagnostics files created by unRAID and I found the files shown in the attached pics.

 

The 'smart' directory at least shows the disk name (sda, sdb, etc...) and there is further info for each such as the size of the disks in the file itself. This would not be to hard to match up to the 'df' output I also found shows where each drive was mounted in /mnt.

 

Good Lord, many thanks for taking the time to help here...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Frank1940]

The sda, sdb. etc designations are immaterial.  What is important is the serial number of the drive and the disk1, cache, etc. descriptors.   That is what Unraid needs when you are setting up your array.  You match assign the drives to those descriptors using the serial number of the drive.   For Example, you want to assign to the disk1 position, the drive whose the last four numbers of its serial number are 18WL.

 

You appear to have no parity drive.  Is this the case?

[bukweet]

BAM!

 

I got it all back! Disks, vms, dockers, everything!

 

For any other poor soul who needs it:

 

I plugged my unRAID flash drive into my laptop and copied all of the files onto my desktop. Among the files is a log directory containing zipped diagnostic files. I unzipped the most recent one.

 

I then did a fresh re-install of unRAID onto the flash drive as instructed by itimpi.

 

Once unRAIDs GUI came up, I was able to re-register unRAID using the link to my registration key file that was sent to me when I purchased unRAID.

 

I was then able to use the file names in the 'smart' directory to match up my drives to the disk numbers as instructed by Frank1940. This let me assigned my disks to the correct disk numbers in unRAID. Upon starting the array, everything was back.

 

itimpi: Lesson learned about backing up unRAID. I will check out the CA Backup plugin that you mentioned.

 

Frank1940: As far as parity disks go, I have just bought the hard drive that I will use for this.

 

I can't thank y'all enough, cheers!

 

 

 

 

[itimpi]

It is also worth pointing out that if you click on the flash drive on the Main tab there is an option to download a backup of the USB drive to your PC/Mac which makes it easy to recreate your USB drive with all settings intact.  It is a good idea to do this any time you make a significant configuration change.