Borked my UnRaid

Psittac · February 15

The other day I was getting ready for an audio friend to come over and realized that my unraid server had a couple thousand error's on one of the drives. I randomly clicked buttons not thinking, tried to stop an array that was error checking and in the end unplugged my server. Now it doesn't come up on my web browser and I'm assuming that at least the unraid install is borked. Tomorrow I'm going to reinstall it and start over.

What I'm wondering is can I adopt or recover all of my information that was on 4 hdd's and 3 nvme drives? If possible what is the recovery process? I have 4 hdd's in an array and the rest are single drives, namely cache and an install drive for vm's.

I'll be messing with this tomorrow but was hoping to get some word's of wisdom ahead of time. The important data on the hdd's is in cold storage and the not important data can be re-acquired. I'm just hoping to salvage what I can, the VM's would be nice to get again too.

The drives were just old shingled 3TB hdd's that I threw in there for a stop gap to building a full array. That's probably why they errored out.

porina · February 15

4 hours ago, Psittac said:

Now it doesn't come up on my web browser and I'm assuming that at least the unraid install is borked. Tomorrow I'm going to reinstall it and start over.

Get a monitor on it and see what it says. It is unlikely for the install to get corrupted since it rarely writes to the boot drive outside of software version updates.

I'm not familiar with the recovery process for a new install but it should be possible to import all the old drives and continue where you left off, but they might have to be assigned into exactly the same slots. Hope you have either a backup of the configuration or at the least a screenshot of the drives.

4 hours ago, Psittac said:

What I'm wondering is can I adopt or recover all of my information that was on 4 hdd's and 3 nvme drives? If possible what is the recovery process? I have 4 hdd's in an array and the rest are single drives, namely cache and an install drive for vm's.

The array, is it 1 parity 3 data? If one of the data disks is going bad, then you can pull it and the system will use the parity data to recreate a virtual disk with that data on it. Get a spare disk in and it'll rebuild it. However without knowing what the error was, there might be considerations outside what I have mentioned.

The single disks should remain intact as long as they weren't the failing one.

4 hours ago, Psittac said:

I'll be messing with this tomorrow but was hoping to get some word's of wisdom ahead of time.

Remember that the data on surviving drives is still intact. Worst case you only lose the data on the disk that failed if parity can't save you. It will still be up to chance what data was on that disk. Do not make any changes to any disk before you understand what was actually happening, and what the current state is.

Psittac · February 16

On 2/15/2026 at 3:07 AM, porina said:

Get a monitor on it and see what it says. It is unlikely for the install to get corrupted since it rarely writes to the boot drive outside of software version updates.

I'm not familiar with the recovery process for a new install but it should be possible to import all the old drives and continue where you left off, but they might have to be assigned into exactly the same slots. Hope you have either a backup of the configuration or at the least a screenshot of the drives.

The array, is it 1 parity 3 data? If one of the data disks is going bad, then you can pull it and the system will use the parity data to recreate a virtual disk with that data on it. Get a spare disk in and it'll rebuild it. However without knowing what the error was, there might be considerations outside what I have mentioned.

The single disks should remain intact as long as they weren't the failing one.

Remember that the data on surviving drives is still intact. Worst case you only lose the data on the disk that failed if parity can't save you. It will still be up to chance what data was on that disk. Do not make any changes to any disk before you understand what was actually happening, and what the current state is.

Thank you for the advice, I hooked it to a monitor and it just simply worked. No idea why it wasn't booting up before.

I also found that my DAS had a power supply that was going bad so I replaced that today. Could be why I was getting errors. I will be trying to rebuild everything later today.