I plugged an external USB drive into my server with plans to copy the content to a share.  A few minutes later I went to logon to the web interface and it only shows the menu headers - nothing works.  In looking into this trouble I found others with trouble because their USB flash drive had failed.

 

In my case - I don't see any USB devices at all using lsub from the command line.  I used to see the flash drive and any external USB storage I had plugged in.  I first tried the external hard drive on another computer and it comes up just fine there.  I then tried my USB Flash drive that has unraid on it and it also works on another computer.  Neither show up when I plug them into the unraid server.

 

I'd just reboot but I just finished a parity check yesterday and don't really want to have to start over again.  Is there any way to properly shutdown unraid from the command line so it is 'clean'?

 

Maybe a way to reset the USB buses without restarting?

 

Anyone run into this before?

 

Thanks!

5 minutes ago, greer1999 said:

Is there any way to properly shutdown unraid from the command line so it is 'clean'?

powerdown

shuts off the server

powerdown -r

reboots

Thanks for the quick response!  So using powerdown won't require the parity check to run again?  I ask only because I have a faint memory of using powerdown years ago when the web interface crashed and it required a parity check.  Could be that my memory is failing me!  Or maybe I used shutdown back then rather than the powerdown script.

 

It is a clean powerdown.  There are however some circumstances where using it (or the GUI) will result in an unclean shutdown, if it has to start killing processes to accomplish what it needs to do.

Great - thank you! 

 

Have you ever had the boot USB drive (and all the others) just disappear like this?  It doesn't matter what USB device I plug in - none of them are recognized.

 

I'm not sure what to blame for the trouble.  Its strange because the motherboard has two USB controllers - one for 4 USB 2.0 ports and one for 4 USB 3 ports.  None of the 8 ports work when I plug a known good USB drive in.  

29 minutes ago, Squid said:

if it has to start killing processes to accomplish what it needs to do.

I've actually been meaning to ask about this, is the information in this link still accurate?

 

Damn...  Started right back up and all the USB devices are working again.  Parity check started.

 

Had a bunch of errors scroll by as it shutdown.  I suspect because it couldn't find the USB Flash drive that has unraid installed on it.

 

I'll just have to live with another 24 hours of parity check.  I just wish I knew what caused the trouble to begin with.

53 minutes ago, Dissones4U said:

I've actually been meaning to ask about this, is the information in this link still accurate?

 

Way out of date.  That doesn't consider any of the various other services (docker, vm's, etc) running.  Although on a rare occasion a seriously crashed container can prevent the docker.img from unmounting  So you would do

umount -f /var/lib/docker

 

If the flash drive drops then you are guaranteed a parity check when the system boots back up, because there is no way for the shutdown process to write the flag to the flash drive that says it was a clean shutdown. It is still a good idea to try and shut down as gracefully as possible though (i.e. run the powerdown command) to minimize the chance that there will be an actual problem with the array.

Thanks, makes sense.  I just wish I knew what the root of the trouble was.  All the USB devices went away - not just the flash drive.  So far I haven't had any other trouble with the system.