# How to force ElasticSearch to recover unassigned shards

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-force-elasticsearch-to-recover-unassigned-shards/6514>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [January 26, 2012, 6:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-force-elasticsearch-to-recover-unassigned-shards/6514 "2012-01-26T18:14:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sorostaran](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Sorostaran](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sorostaran)\
**Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 6:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-force-elasticsearch-to-recover-unassigned-shards/6514/1 "2012-01-26T18:14:04Z")

</div>

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.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sorostaran](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Sorostaran](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sorostaran)\
**Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 7:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-force-elasticsearch-to-recover-unassigned-shards/6514/2 "2012-01-26T19:01:42Z")

</div>

Looks like setting initial\_shards to 0 solved the issue.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 3:41am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-force-elasticsearch-to-recover-unassigned-shards/6514/3 "2017-07-06T03:41:21Z")

</div>