I recently made some network changes that required a few reboots. Unfortunately, on the last reboot, the server would not come up. When I plugged in a monitor, the initial blue choice screen would not even show up, I was just left with a black screen.

Concerned that I had either fragged my flash drive or mobo, I tried other installer USBs in the server (pfSense & Ubuntu) and they both loaded up. I tried the Unraid flash drive in another PC and that loaded up into the blue screen!

I ran a scan and repair on the Unraid flash drive and that brought up no errors, but it would still not boot up in the server.

Any suggestions what to do next to isolate the problem?

I've not got a backup of the flash drive, but it is still readable, so I'm able to copy it's contents on to a new drive if necessary. If the issue is USB drive related, will copying the old files across work?

 

Make a backup of the flash drive. (It never hurts to have a backup of the flash drive!!!!!!!)   I do believe that all of the Unraid configuration information is stored in the  config  directory/folder on the flash drive.

12 hours ago, Boyturtle said:

I tried the Unraid flash drive in another PC and that loaded up into the blue screen!

This is a sure sign that something is amiss on that flash drive. 

 

What I would do first is to do a new install of Unraid on a new flash drive and see if that boots.  (That will not harm your current Unraid system unless you tell it to do something that results in a write to some disk on the server!)   If that works, shutdown the server and overwrite the   config   folder with the one from the backup.  Now see if the server will boot.  If it does and everything appears to work, you can transfer your Unraid license to the new flash drive by following the prompts.

 

About the flash drive to try this with.   I, personally, would pick a USB2 drive between 8GB and 32GB made by a recognized manufacturer of flash drives.  (Try to avoid all 'rebranded' drives and cheap generic drives.)  Many folks who have had flash drive issues are avoiding the 'micro' sized drives as they may have heat dissipation issues.

 

Personally, I would consider dumping the any flash drive in any case of a failure.  They are cheap and, if it fails once, why take a chance on it failing again?

Edited July 14, 20205 yr by Frank1940

8 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Make a backup of the flash drive. (It never hurts to have a backup of the flash drive!!!!!!!)   I do believe that all of the Unraid configuration information is stored in the  config  directory/folder on the flash drive.

This is a sure sign that something is amiss on that flash drive. 

 

What I would do first is to do a new install of Unraid on a new flash drive and see if that boots.  (That will not harm your current Unraid system unless you tell it to do something that results in a write to some disk on the server!)   If that works, shutdown the server and overwrite the   config   folder with the one from the backup.  Now see if the server will boot.  If it does and everything appears to work, you can transfer your Unraid license to the new flash drive by following the prompts.

 

About the flash drive to try this with.   I, personally, would pick a USB2 drive between 8GB and 32GB made by a recognized manufacturer of flash drives.  (Try to avoid all 'rebranded' drives and cheap generic drives.)  Many folks who have had flash drive issues are avoiding the 'micro' sized drives as they may have heat dissipation issues.

 

Personally, I would consider dumping the any flash drive in any case of a failure.  They are cheap and, if it fails once, why take a chance on it failing again?

Thanks for that. It turns out that the problem was not a fragged USB drive or mobo, but rather a tricky bridge network config on a VM that would stop the system going up properly . As it happened, after a fairly long wait, I was able to ping the Unraid server, but not access the webgui. I was able to access my pfSense VM (hosted on Unraid) which has it's own NICs. After doing a bit of research, I opened terminal and removed the offending VM XML file symlink from /etc/libvirt/qemu/autostart. I then restarted the server and it came up with all webguis working. I have now taken a backup of my flash drive and will revisit Spaceinvader One's video about automating the USB backups going forward.