How to force ElasticSearch to recover unassigned shards

Dear Shay,

We are running 17.10 and just recently had a power failure on a small 2 node cluster.
After power has been restored the servers tried to recover but failed. Now we are left with:

{

cluster_name: dffess
status: red
timed_out: false
number_of_nodes: 2
number_of_data_nodes: 2
active_primary_shards: 0
active_shards: 0
relocating_shards: 0
initializing_shards: 0
unassigned_shards: 28

}

There are 28 unassigned_shards which can not be assigned anymore?
We have restarted the node / entire cluster many times without success.
There seems to be nothing we can do to make ElasticSearch start recovery on those shards again.

Please help.

Looks like setting initial_shards to 0 solved the issue.