Unraid Flash USB Error - Old backup

Conan257 · 13 Mar 2019 at 18:45

Unraid had the power button pressed and shut down. Upon trying to start it again I'm getting a syslinux error.

Thinking I need to rebuild my flash usb drive, but the backup I have was from a little while ago, when I had 3 drives + parity, and I now have 4 drives + parity....

Should i just copy my syslinux folder over the old one?
Copy all the backup over?
Rebuild the drive from scratch?
Cry a little?

4th drive isn't a problem if it ends up having to be formatted, but I don't want the system getting confused and assigning the wrong drives to parity etc....

Conan257 · 13 Mar 2019 at 18:53

Copied the old syslinux, didn't work...

Thinking of taking the old backup with the new super.dat and drive config files?

Conan257 · 13 Mar 2019 at 19:31

ok, just for those who may have the same issue at some point.

I copied all the files from the (assumed) corrupt Unraid install
Format USB
Copy files back to USB
Run make-bootable.bat
Reinstall in server
Works as it should!

Perhaps I'm the lucky one?!

Edit:

Then make sure I run frequent backups of USB

andy_mk3 · 13 Mar 2019 at 19:37

Glad to know you managed to sort it. I've never taken a backup of mine so I'll make sure I do that tonight

Conan257 · 14 Mar 2019 at 12:08

The REALLY important bit:

If you restore your USB from a backup, but have changed the drive allocations, you run the risk of losing data. Worst case scenario is you've taken a backup, then moved a parity drive to be a data drive. Upon use of the backup, this "data" drive will be dealt with as a parity drive and data overwritten. Some suggest taking a backup when the drives are spun down, and array stopped. This would allow you to see the drive allocations prior to a parity check.

Another alternative is a fresh unraid install, then allocate all drives as data drives. Any drives previously used as parity will be identified as needing a format. This should allow a full, fresh, reinstall without losing data. Or so I have read!