[SOLVED] Need assistance recovering server

SingularityOS

New Member
Nov 28, 2021
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HI all,

It sucks that my first post has to be trying to recover my server, but here we are:

The story goes like this; I have an old Supermicro server (this one), I run various VMs as you do. Some of my family would like to be able to stream live TV via my Plex server. I have a WinTV tuner card, so I shut down the host, unplug from power, insert the card, boot back up. I finish running the antenna cable, and the moment I touch the connector to the WinTV card, the server instantly shuts down. I boot back up, and I'm greeted with what looks like disk errors and I am unable to reach the web interface. Looks like possible one drive has failed, and the PCI NIC I was using for network access has also failed. It no longer shows any activity lights.

I took a video of the bootup sequence here. I'd like to be able to recover the VMs if possible, but I'd be ok if I lost them. All my critical data is on my Synology, I'd just lose time having to set my VMs up again if I couldn't recover them.

Proxmox is running off of an SSD inside the case of the server and I believe I had 4 of the 5 drive bays in RAID 5 for running the VMs from. The 5th drive bay was just idle I think.

I'm not so great at Linux CLI stuff so I don't really know what to make of what's being presented on boot. I guess if someone is able to help me get one of the onboard NICs working so I can reach the instance, I might be able to recover something?

Thanks for any and all help :)
 
First thing I would do is remove the WinTV card and see if it boots up.

On my home server I use a HDHomeRun, it's a network attached TV tuner so I don't have the pass-through problem, my Plex VM just picks it up from the network. Might be a better option for you when you get your server back up.
 
That your webUI isn't availalbe doesn't mean your NIC is dead. As soon as you add another PCIe card the name of the NIC might change and then doesn't fit any longer to the previous network configuration. You then need to look what the NIC i called now (for example using ip addr), then replace all occurences of your old NIC name with the new NIC name (nano /etc/network/interfaces) and then restart your networking (systemctl restart networking) so your new network configuration will be used.
 
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That your webUI isn't availalbe doesn't mean your NIC is dead. As soon as you add another PCIe card the name of the NIC might change and then doesn't fit any longer to the previous network configuration. You then need to look what the NIC i called now (for example using ip addr), then replace all occurences of your old NIC name with the new NIC name (nano /etc/network/interfaces) and then restart your networking (systemctl restart networking) so your new network configuration will be used.
When I say the NIC is dead I mean there are no indicator lights on the physical card, there was before this occurred. I will try your steps to try and locate one of the onboard NICs and see if that works.
 
Okay so I have it online and my VMs are running. I was planning on moving them to a set of brand new SSDs anyway so I am currently backing them up.

I hadn't realised I had made a mistake when I updated the network device before posting. Still doesn't explain why I can't see the other onboard NIC, but I'm 100% certain the the PCI NIC is dead dead. Thanks everyone.
 

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