Hello. After many years of hearing about Plex, I finally decided to go about setting it up myself, as a I have a home “server” (it’s just a win 11 computer that I can remote into and play files off of 24/7) and would like to be able to easily be able to watch media from it on TVs/similar devices. I followed the very simple setup guide, however upon downloading and installing PMS, right after clicking “finish” and having PMS launch (the windows installer worked without error), I click the icon on the bottom right of the taskbar, and it opens my browser, and I simply see this error:
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<Response code="503" title="Maintenance" status="Plex Media Server is currently running startup maintenance tasks."/>
I figured this was just some “first time setup” stuff but I waited over 24 hours and it didn’t change. I looked up any disk/CPU usage, and found PMS is not using any of my CPU or doing any sort of I/O activity on any of my disks, it’s not doing anything. Upon looking online, I can only find people complaining about this issue upon updating PMS, and database corruption or account stuff is likely the issue. But this is not my issue, I did not update PMS, I am installing it for the first time. And I did not even get the chance to sign in, so it’s not an account issue either. I’m not sure how to just.. get this working.
Things I’ve tried:
Waiting. For days.
Closing PMS and restarting it.
Rebooting the computer.
Fully uninstalling PMS (going in and making sure all its files are deleted, included the stuff in appdata) and reinstalling.
Just to be sure, the computer is not dirt old, it’s a 3700x with 16GB of ram. Win11 is up to date.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I feel like an idiot somehow getting stuck before even starting lol
Also, idk about any of that database repair stuff, it looks like it requires cmd commands and stuff, which I know nothing about. And I don’t understand how it can be a database issue when I am installing PMS for the first time.
Go to your Plex Media Server directory and see if there’s a Setup Plex.html file that you can open, that would trigger the final steps which maybe didn’t get completed?
There is a “setup.html” in C:\Program Files\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plug-ins-f737b826c\WebClient.bundle\Contents\Resources, but when I open it it just opens my browser to a white screen and nothing happens. Checking PMS gives the same error as before.
When I did the “full uninstall” I mentioned before, I actually used BCUninstaller, which goes and finds relevant remnant files and registry entries when uninstalling, which it did. I don’t remember if they were the same entries as mentioned here but I’ll try and go manually check if they still exist after an uninstall, and I’ll do a reboot in between uninstall and reinstall, just to try something new. (edit: it didn’t work)
Unrelated but, is there a way to make the Plex Forums email me when I get a reply to my post? I thought I had the settings on for it, and it says I’m watching this post, but I don’t get any emails. I’d rather not just keep this tab open 24/7 just to see if I got any responses.
Click the icon for your profile, , then the cog wheel and then email….you should see the settings for when to email. I’m on mobile right now, so it may be different on desktop.
Yeah, I have “Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics” on “always” (it was like that by default) but it’s not sending anything. Oh well I just need to remember to check.
My VPN bypasses LAN access, and I even had split tunnel on for PMS specifically, so it shouldn’t have broken the install, but maybe the installer itself wasn’t bypassing it? Idk
Either way, I just turned off my VPN completely, installed PMS, and it worked perfectly fine. After a reboot and my VPN auto-turning itself on and everything, PMS still works, and hopefully will continue to work in the future. I hope any auto-updating is done inside of PMS itself else it might break if it updates.
In hindsight seems like a pretty obvious thing, but I really didn’t think to try it till now, I usually have no issues with the split tunnel feature. Either way, hope this specific issue helps someone else at some point!
