I’ve been running Plex for several years, and after getting tired of maintaining my library across several hard drives, purchased an External Drive big enough to hold everything, with plenty of room to expand. When moving everything around, Plex was fine, but after a few days gave me a message that the database had become corrupted. A couple days after that, the server stopped showing up in the web app, so after investigating, found that Plex had stopped running. Launched it again, and after approximately 4 seconds the icon disappeared from my Taskbar, and server still can’t be found. Uninstalled, and reinstalled the latest release, and behaviour remains the same. I launch the server, and a few seconds later it’s shut down. I went through and removed everything I can find (directories across all my old hard drives, registry entry, everything in local and roaming profiles. I get I have to start from scratch, but even that isn’t working.
Verify that the external hard drive hasn’t swapped its drive letter since installing Plex server. This can quite easily happen if you juggle around with external storage like USB hard drives and memory sticks. Of course there is also a method to prevent it: assign a static drive letter.
Plex server closing itself is usually caused by a problem with the database file. If it’s either damaged or completely missing.
Take a look into the Windows registry where Plex is expecting to find its Plex data folder.
If you have moved the plex data from its default location on drive C: to your external hard drive, and that drive has since changed its drive letter, then Plex server closing itself is to be expected.
If there is a discrepancy between the registry key and the actual location of the plex data folder, change the registry entry.
Recommended: change the drive letter of the external drive to a static drive letter first.
If the external drive is a “mobile” hard drive (usually advertised as power-saving), then it should not be used to house the Plex data folder. These drives tend to ignore the Windows power management and spin down their platters whenever they deem it right. Which then leads to longer timeouts and potentially to database damages in Plex.
Also verify that your IP address didn’t change. I had that issue once when I updated my LAN subnet. I realized the IP address is hard coded in a settings file and I had to manually update it to the latest IP address, before the server to start working again.
Your directions led me to another Plex folder that nothing else had turned up. Clearing that up seems to have resolved the problem, and now I just have to start slowly re-identifying all my media. Thank you kindly.
