# Nearly 50% shards marked as 'unassigned' after cluster restart

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/nearly-50-shards-marked-as-unassigned-after-cluster-restart/197012>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [August 27, 2019, 10:35pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/nearly-50-shards-marked-as-unassigned-after-cluster-restart/197012 "2019-08-27T22:35:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ethrbunny](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ethrbunny/32/34603_2.png) [@ethrbunny](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ethrbunny)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 10:35pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/nearly-50-shards-marked-as-unassigned-after-cluster-restart/197012/1 "2019-08-27T22:35:15Z")

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Working cluster running in Kubernetes. This morning I updated k8 + docker and this meant restarting the master node(s) which meant restarting everything. ([thread](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/find-master-node-timeout-needed/196827)) This is a familiar process - we've done it pretty regularly (for various reasons) without any real problem.

Today was different for some reason. Of 3560 shards 1686 are marked as 'unassigned'. Ive always had 1 or more replicas for each shard in hopes of avoiding lost data when k8 is fussy.

Is there any way to convince elastic to pick up these pieces? Or am I SOL?

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**Author:** ![ethrbunny](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ethrbunny/32/34603_2.png) [@ethrbunny](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ethrbunny)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 6:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/nearly-50-shards-marked-as-unassigned-after-cluster-restart/197012/2 "2019-08-28T18:10:00Z")

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For future reference - to fix this I removed the persistent storage on the master node so it would start with an empty volume. Then restarted everything and let elastic figure itself out.

Problem solved.

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**Author:** ![Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/christian_dahlqvist/32/4617_2.png) [@Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Christian_Dahlqvist)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2019, 5:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/nearly-50-shards-marked-as-unassigned-after-cluster-restart/197012/3 "2019-08-30T17:06:53Z")

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> [@ethrbunny](#):
>
> For future reference - to fix this I removed the persistent storage on the master node so it would start with an empty volume.

Master nodes need persistent storage. Not having it will can cause a lot of pain and data loss later on.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 27, 2019, 5:07pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/nearly-50-shards-marked-as-unassigned-after-cluster-restart/197012/4 "2019-09-27T17:07:10Z")

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