My NAS.

Hello, I've been using OMV for some time now. I aimed to create a working storage system that I can access at home from any device. Later I decided to add Plex to my system and there my problems started. After adding a few more hard drives and creating a multi-device system, I installed Plex. It worked for a few days until the first restart. After some time looking at what went wrong, I left it as it was because I did not have much time at the time. But now I have tried to rebuild a system. I thought my problem was a motherboard. But, after building a new system, the problems came back almost the same. I'm not a Linux guy and it is hard for me to look for things that might be the problem. So I thought that this time I'll try to explain my problem in a forum.

I've been googling for a solution to my problem. Here is what I found and the issues with it. After the build, I installed Portainer and then Plex. The system worked fine until I turned it off and put it on a shelf where it belongs to sit. One of my file systems went missing. I looked for the cause. I found many error messages about the "movit" service. After some digging, I found commands that fixed the errors. But now, a HDD is missing from a system and two file systems are gone. I do not want to mess with the system without knowing what I'm doing, maybe you can help me start somewhere.

Error: 2025-01-23T12:14:30+0200 OMV monit[1007]: 'mountpoint_srv_dev-disk-by-uuid-edb40772-02f5-41fa-b52e-731b27911ea1' status failed (32) -- /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-edb40772-02f5-41fa-b52e-731b27911ea1 is not a mountpoint

Commands that helped to get rid of those errors:
rm /etc/monit/conf.d/openmediavault-filesystem.conf
service monit restart
Thread: monit errors

Maybe there is a way to provide more details for you? All cables is sitting properly. NAS was working good in a new place where it should sit all the time, but after reboot or update it started acting strange.

So now it's a new setup because I thought my previous motherboard was faulty. I bought a new one with 8 SATA ports since my old motherboard didn’t have enough. To work around that, I had installed a PCI SATA card to expand the number of available ports, but I suspected it might have been causing problems. The new motherboard is an ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe, running with an Intel i7 3770k CPU. For installation, I mount a GPU of some kind just for setup purposes.

The system has three pairs of HDDs configured as RAID. Each pair consists of identical HDDs—same brand, model, and capacity. They are all set up as Mirror RAID (RAID 1) for redundancy. The PSU is 300W, which should be enough for my setup.

Originally, I wanted a storage system for my home. I was tired of constantly plugging in flash drives and external HDDs to transfer files between devices. I also run a small business from home with my wife, where quick access to data is essential. I handle machines like lasers and printers, while she works on drawings and designs for production. I needed a storage solution that I could manage myself, rather than relying on cloud storage. A home-built NAS system seemed to cover all my needs.

Later, I discovered Plex, which I thought would be a great addition. However, during my first setup, everything worked fine until I connected a second pair of HDDs for RAID. After that, everything ran smoothly—until the first restart. Due to time constraints, I left the system as it was. My main storage RAID was fine, so I sacrificed my home media center to keep my data storage stable.

As I wanted to get things right, I decided to buy a new motherboard and set up everything again. But after just a few days of use, issues started appearing. I suspect that I may be doing something wrong during the setup stage.

I’m primarily a Windows user, and my experience with RAID setups is limited. Additionally, I installed the HDDs in stages, which might be causing a problem that I don’t fully understand.

This is my NAS story. Now, I’m unsure whether I should reinstall everything from scratch or try to troubleshoot the issues.

Currently, my system has three pairs of hard drives:

One 1TB pair for my work-related data storage.

One 4TB pair, which serves as a general storage solution for both my personal data and Plex media center.

One 500GB pair, which is used for temporary files before sorting and transferring them to the other two storage arrays.

How I Set Everything Up:

First, I downloaded the latest OMV installation file and installed it. Then, I connected the HDDs in pairs, one set at a time.

I inserted two hard drives that would be configured as RAID, initialized them, set up RAID, and formatted them as a file system.

After that, I powered off the NAS and repeated the process for the next two pairs of HDDs.

I now realize that this might have been a mistake—I probably should have installed all HDDs at once, set up the system, and ensured that all disks were recognized from the very beginning of a fresh installation.

After setting up the storage, I installed OMV-Extras, then Docker, then Portainer, and finally Plex. I followed this specific installation sequence based on the information I gathered from a few YouTube tutorials:

1. YouTube Video 12. YouTube Video 2

The Issue:

After the installation, the NAS was working perfectly—both the storage and the Plex server ran smoothly. However, after a few days (without rebooting the NAS), the 1TB storage suddenly became inaccessible. When I restarted the NAS, both hard drives from that array were no longer recognized by the system.

I checked the log files and found many similar errors reported by Monit:

Error: 2025-01-23T12:14:30+0200 OMV monit[1007]: 'mountpoint_srv_dev-disk-by-uuid-edb40772-02f5-41fa-b52e-731b27911ea1' status failed (32) -- /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-edb40772-02f5-41fa-b52e-731b27911ea1 is not a mountpoint.

As I understand it, I can no longer see these errors because I mistakenly deleted something that I shouldn’t have.

I apologize for not providing all the necessary details upfront. If there's anything specific I should check or clarify, please let me know. Right now, I feel like I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’m not sure where to start troubleshooting. That’s why I decided to post here—to at least get started somewhere.

I only relied on YouTube because I needed a starting point to get hands-on experience with setting up a NAS—I didn’t expect to run into such issues. However, it seems that even the newest videos I found were already too outdated.

At this point, I see the best course of action is to redo everything from scratch using the official OMV documentation.

As for the hard drives, I can’t really check them because the system no longer mounts them, and they don’t even appear in the "Disks" section.

Would it help if I booted the NAS with a monitor connected and gathered the information displayed during startup? I recall seeing a few errors there from the very beginning after installing the system. At the time, I googled them, and they didn’t seem critical—but maybe they are relevant after all..?

Okay, I took some photos and screenshots from the CMD window. There are some errors, but I don’t understand them. I need help figuring out what they mean and what to do next.

Also, I want to mention that I tested all the hard drives on another computer using HDD Regenerator before installing them into the NAS, and they didn’t show any serious issues.

I also want to thank you for the help you've already provided—I really appreciate it!

I can’t believe I was so sure that my cables were fine, only to discover later that they were the culprit. Looking back, I realize that the problem started after I installed a fan to cool the hard drives (they were reaching ~70°C, which is not good for them). The fan installation caused some loose connections, which led to the whole problem. But, due to my previous experience with the first NAS system I built, I didn’t connect the dots correctly. As Chente mentioned earlier, it’s easy to overlook the most common issues with so many possible causes. I regret not following that advice right from the start.

Step 1: Cable Check

The first thing I did was check all the cables. I found that one SATA cable was disconnected, which caused one of the RAID arrays to fail, and the power cable had a faulty wire that wasn’t properly connected, causing another RAID array to disappear from the system. This issue wasn’t obvious until I physically took the cables apart and checked them closely.

Tip: I should’ve started by checking the BIOS first, as the drives causing issues weren’t even showing as plugged in. This narrowed down the problem significantly and helped me pinpoint where to look.

Step 2: Checking RAID and Disk Visibility

After fixing the cables, I checked the system. The drives that weren’t showing up before started appearing, and the RAID arrays became visible. This was crucial because two out of the three RAID arrays weren’t visible earlier. Once they appeared, I could narrow down the issue. However, one RAID array showed up as "online," but it wasn’t displaying any disk space availability. This pointed me to a specific RAID array that was corrupted, and from there, I focused on the underlying filesystem issue causing the problem.

Step 3: Filesystem Repair and RAID Recovery

At this point, I proceeded with unmounting the filesystem. The command I used was:

sudo umount /dev/md1

Then, I ran a check on the RAID array:

sudo fsck -f -y /dev/md1

The -y flag automatically answered 'yes' to all the system prompts, fixing errors and inconsistencies with the filesystem journal, disk, and quota information, which would have been too tedious to do manually.

Once the journal was repaired and the filesystem fixed, I was able to successfully remount the RAID array:

sudo mount /dev/md1

Everything was back to normal!

Step 4: System Check and Monitoring

After everything was repaired, I ran some checks to ensure the disks were in good health. I used the following commands to monitor the SMART status of each drive:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdf

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdg

Both drives showed no significant issues, and the SMART status indicated that the drives were in good health.

Conclusion

In the end, everything was back to normal. I was able to mount the RAID array, fix the corrupted filesystem, and the drives are working without issues. It’s always a good idea to check the basics, like cables and BIOS, before diving into more complex diagnostics. This experience taught me that sometimes the simplest problems, like a loose cable, can cause the biggest headaches.

I’m leaving this comment here for future users so they don’t make the same mistakes I did. It’s easy to overlook the basics, but as I’ve learned, it’s crucial to start with the simplest checks. I also want to thank everyone who participated and helped along the way. Your input made all the difference!

Thanks for sharing!

When I built my system, everything was freshly assembled, and I personally plugged in every cable, making sure they were properly connected. But one small mistake in the pursuit of better hardware cooling ended up giving me a major headache...