Server Won’t Start!

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#:1.42
Player Version#:
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

Hello!

I went to my server just now and the computer crashed. I brought it back up and now my server won’t even start! I have tried deleting the app and reinstalling and removing prefs/logs/caches and restarting to no avail.

Help!

I am running Mac High Sierra on an old iMac. It was running fine this weekend.

2

If the Plex Media Server won’t start and doesn’t even get to the stage where it’ll be writing to the server logs, you can attempt the following procedure to see if there’s any error messages on the OS level:

  1. Open Finder and navigate to /Applications
  2. Select Show Content from the context menu of the Plex Media Server.app item
  3. Navigate to Contents/MacOS
  4. Open the Terminal app
  5. Drag the Plex Media Server executable from the Finder window (#3) into the Terminal Window and press Return to execute it

This is no different from running the app, so it won’t succeed – but you should get a more specific error message about what’s causing it to fail starting.

3

Hello! Thank you for the information. I did do that. I found out my database is corrupt. I went in and found the database and put it in a corrupt folder and went back three days and changed the names to the backups and got the server to actually load. HOWEVER, the page will load but it shows all my folders offline. I can’t get it to change. I have even tried going in and reconnecting them by reloading the link. I don’t know what I need to do. It is very frustrating.

4

Restarted the Server I gather

5

Yes. Many times.

6

I had this happen after relocating the DB to a new drive. Followed repairing a corrupt DB guide

https://support.plex.tv/articles/repair-a-corrupted-database/

Rebuilding the indexes did the trick. You can try copying the original DB back and running a repair.

7

Just to clarify… you created a „corrupt“ subfolder where you placed the active/current database. Then you restored a version from Time Machine?

Time Machine backups of the PMS database are not guaranteed to be using a clean snapshot. I’ve seen various reports where users kept restoring Time Machine backups just to return to a corrupted database (e.g. if the Time Machine snapshot was taken while PMS was writing some changes). That restored backup might be less corrupted than your original one and your server might therefore start properly… but there could still be lots of issues.

It’s best to use one of the time-stamped backups created by PMS itself as part of its scheduled tasks if you want to restore the database from a working backup.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/202485658-restore-a-database-backed-up-via-scheduled-tasks/

8

No, I did a restore from a database that was dated. Then restarted the server.

But I will say, that today when I restarted the server, it did NOT recognize the old links to the media folders, but it did generate new ones that seem to be working just fine. Had to do a little maintenance to get it back like I like it, but all in all, it seems to be working now. I’m am tired of all the crashing. Iknow it is because I am running OLD macOS and OLD 2011 iMac. I think I will upgrade to a Mac Mini and use an external HD. i am just hoping that USB 3 is fast enough for the external HD. I wish I could afford a Thunderbolt HD but alas I cannot.

Thanks to everyone for their help!!