Server Version#: 1.21.1.3876
Player Version#: All players on all devices
I returned from Christmas break to find that all of my media is marked as unavailable on the server. None of my devices, nor anyone else with access to my server, can play anything. I’ve gone through the Troubleshooting page regarding this topic and the file names and locations have not changed, restarting the PMS and the server itself has not resolved the issue, and as far as I can tell, none of the file permissions have changed. I thought that maybe a recent Windows update might have screwed something up, but so far I can’t tell what that would have been.
I run my Plex server on an i5 Intel NUC with 16 GB RAM and the latest version of Windows 10 Pro (20H2). My media is on a Drobo 5N NAS and the NUC server has no problem accessing the shared directories or playing any file in those directories using other programs (like VLC).
My next step is to uninstall and reinstall the PMS unless someone can point me in another direction. Obviously I don’t want to have to do that, but I will if I have to.
Just following. I’ve also had this happen sporadically where the video is on the drive but “unavailable” in Plex. Fortunately, I’ve been able to recover the watched status of reimported movies and shows by syncing my library with trakt.tv (and using kitana to pull the data back into my Plex server).
Wait to see what someone else with windows says (I use Ubuntu), but you might have to do a Plex dance (move the files out of the library folder, tell Plex to empty the trash after a library sync, sync your libraries, add your media back to the library folders, sync again). This should put all of your media back into Plex BUT all of your items will show as new, unwatched items for everyone…
Thanks for the info. Whatever this issue is/was, it seems to have worked itself out, because I haven’t done anything to the Plex server and I can watch all of my media now. I’ll come back here if it starts acting up again.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” - Michael Corleone
Yeah, everything seemed to be working until a couple of hours ago. My parents texted, then called, me to tell me they were watching a movie and it cut off part way through and they couldn’t access it anymore. My sister said that she couldn’t access my server for the last couple of weeks. The server has been working fine for the last week or so, but as soon as Mom texted me, I got nothing.
So I checked the server and sure enough, all of my media was listed as unavailable, again. Remote Access was enabled and nothing else looked out of place, but all my media was unavailable to PMS.
My Dobo’s diagnostics aren’t showing anything amiss either. I did notice that it cycled the power on one hard drive this morning, but nothing in those logs seems to indicate to me there is any issues on the NAS’s hard drives.
So now I’m wiping out all of my libraries and rebuilding them from scratch. Its annoying, but hopefully it’ll work. As least I’m not losing any media.
I just tried to recreate a library and PMS won’t see the mapped network drive where all of my media is located on the NAS (the M:\ drive). It only gives me the C: and D: drives which are the physical SSDs on the NUC itself. Windows 10 on the NUC recognizes the M:\ drive and its mapped location on the Drobo just fine.
I manually typed in the path to my movies location (M:\Video\Movies) and it shows up as empty in PMS running on my NUC. If I do the same thing in PMS running on my desktop, it recognizes it just fine (I keep PMS on my desktop computer, but I don’t normally keep any libraries in it because the computer isn’t on 24/7).
Am I going to have to uninstall PMS from my NUC server and reinstall it?
After adding or removing drives or mapped drive letters, stop and restart Plex server.
Make sure to run Plex server under the same Windows user account, under which you were creating the drive letter mapping for the network file share.
(i.e. don’t use “Run as Administrator”. Don’t use more than one Windows user account on your server without taking special precautions. )
If your NAS requires the input of username and password to access the file share, make sure it is using an identical username and password as your Windows user account.
Don’t rely on Windows storing the access credentials for your NAS if they’re different.
If you are running Plex as a Windows service (requires extra software), drive letter mappings don’t work at all.
Well, uninstalling PMS and reinstalling worked for about a minute. I was able to see the M:\ drive in Plex when trying to set up a library, but it disappeared again when I tried to set up a second library. Then when it disappeared, the first library stopped working.
I call the computer a server, but I don’t have it set up in any special way. It’s an Intel NUC running Windows 10 Pro (so I can remote desktop into it) running PMS at start-up. I’m not running PMS as a service, I installed it on the server the same as any other program. I do have a scheduled task that starts PMS every 15 minutes because I was running into an issue where PMS would just stop randomly (sometimes it would be days or weeks, sometimes I couldn’t keep the damn thing running for more than a few minutes at a time).
The Drobo 5N only requires a password when I first set up a connection or try to muck around in its settings, which I don’t do from that computer anyway. When I remote into the NUC, Windows recognizes the mapped network drive with no problems and I can play anything in there using VLC. The problem now is that PMS won’t recognize it being there.
This set up I currently have has run for about 2 years without any major hiccups until now, and I don’t know why things have suddenly changed.
