a short story of a overly long setup

[Gamer3107]

Man, I just had the worst time setting up the OS. 

TLDR: A corrupted drive can cause strange problems. And so can messing with the TrueNas interface.

So I have a variety of old 2TB drives I wanted to put to good use. The oldest of which is from 2013 (out of my first PC) and has basically been in use constantly since then. Well, I have also known it to still work since I had it installed in my main rig up to a few days ago.

Well, I also had a few strange and unexplained oddities with my pc. For example an unexplained second Windows installation on that drive despite it not having been a boot drive since about 2017. 

The only problem that caused, was a "select windows" screen after the boot screen. This screen survived MULTIPLE formattings and two different new boot drives, so I gave up on fixing that and lived with it.

Now after that backstory to the relevant part. After I spent a day combining some old parts into something working I started installing Hex OS today. At first, everything went fine (except for having secure boot on) and after following the guide everything worked. Almost. I have even installed and tested Plex at this point. Now I wanted to see what would happen if one of the HDDs broke. so first I have a look at the storage tab and I see something weird. An unused drive. 

But I had selected 5 of 5 drives in the setup. it also told me I have 8TB of storage. so why does it show an extra drive? 

Well, in the details, I see that four of the five have a name and show me a serial number, like the extra one, but one was different. It only showed a long number and no details. weird.

So I did the sensible thing and restarted. And oh no, now it shows my array as degraded, and there is still the extra drive.

I tried replacing the number drive with the extra one. no luck. (but it still showed a success popup?)

At that point, I resigned myself to messing with TrueNAS directly. but nothing worked.

that was until I connected each drive individually and totally erased them. Whatever strange thing happened to the drive only went away after that.

But this is not where this story ends of course. 

No, because I seemed to have messed with TrueNAS enough to cause Hex OS to have problems.

setting up the now empty array worked fine. on to instaling Plex. It created the folders as bevor and then nothing. no working web interface. it did not even show as installed in TrueNAS. 

Welp, time to use the nice Reset and restore button. That will fix everything I think.

So I wipe everything and wait.... and wait some more. but nothing happens. even after 15 minutes.

the console on the server's display shows no changes. It does not show up in the dashboard. No rebooting. nothing.

I try to log into TrueNAS. It needs a new password. 

Well, so this install is done.

Back to square one. Fresh install from Boot USB. The array is fine now. Plex installes.

IT FINALLY WORKS. 

Man, I bought Hex OS exactly to have it easy, but well, that's beta software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

still better than pure TrueNAS.

Sorry for the long rant but I got a little annoyed about all this and wanted to share the strange behavior of the array, the Whipe Everything function, and maybe even the problem with reinstalling the same app after having deleted the array. 

Also here's a work-in-progress picture of my 3D Printed 10-bay Micro atx Nas.

 

[Dylan]

Hey @Gamer3107 Thanks for sharing your experience! Sounds like you fought a good fight and I respect both your DIY hardware approach and fair sentiment; yes this is still beta software. Your drives are about as janky as mine, only I have just two. However they are so old, even after running multiple defrag-like tolls on them, when transferring between a 10yo system to a brand new one (connected directly via router with 1GB NIC and Cat6 cabling, I was running ~28Mb/s. It's going to be rough when I transfer 2TB.

Cheers and welcome to the fold!

[MmmBacon]

So hex worked fine it was the lousy hardware inspection pre assembly that caused the problem , got it.