itamaro

A little late on reporting this is solved, but better late than never :-) My issue indeed was the Gigabyte MoBo I used to preclear the disks setting HPA. I was not able to find a way to turn off the "feature" in the BIOS, but the following workaround worked for me: 1. Connect a "dummy HD" as the first device on the mobo, and let the mobo set HPA on it (some spare HD laying around). 2. While the "dummy HD" connected, connect my "real HDs" (the 3TB disks I actually want to use). 3. Use "hdparm" to disable HPA on the "real HDs" (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4194.msg37010#msg37010) 4. VERY IMPORTANT! Restart the server, and use "hdparm" after restart to verify that HPA is indeed disable on the "real HDs" (I actually tried running preclear before restarting the server and noticed in the pre-report that the number of sectors was recognized as if HPA is still enabled!) 5. Rerun preclear on the "real HDs" with HPA disabled Thanks again for the support and advice!

Well, the disks were precleared using a PC with Gigabyte mobo, so I guess this is how they got HPA'd. The actual server has ASUS mobo. Why is this critical to figure out?

Thanks for all the advice! I've looked up on HPA (wasn't aware of the issue before..), and found another thread (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4194.msg37010#msg37010) linked from the topical index with information on how to remove HPA using hdparm. So I used hdparm -N to diagnose that indeed HPA is enabled on the two "smaller" HDs, and not on the "larger" one, then I used hdparm -N p### /dev/sdb to disable HPA on the precleared disk (the one that wasn't assigned to the array yet). I verified HPA was disabled by resetting the server and using hdparm -N to check the status post-reset, which seemed OK. Now I'm trying to assign the "fixed" disk as parity, but unRAID doesn't realize the size changed, and shows the same old size. Do I need to rerun preclear after disabling HPA? or do something else? Thanks, - Itamar.

Hi, I'm running unRAID-5.0rc11. I had two 3TB disks precleared and assigned to disk1 and disk2, and the array was working fine (with no parity, so no protection). Parity was not assigned yet because I wanted to copy a lot of data quickly, and build parity later (migrating from an old NAS). I finished copying data (all of it just on disk1), and then I wanted to add the parity disk. I had another 3TB disk precleared, and tried to assign it as parity, but unRAID didn't let me do it, because it seems the 3TB drive assigned to disk2 was *slightly* larger than the other two 3TB drives (about 1KB, which is weird considering all drives are identical WD RED models purchased together). So I thought I would just swap between disk2 and the 3rd drive - unRAID didn't let me do it ("too many wrong and/or missing disks!"). Then I tried disconnecting the larger drive, so unRAID sees only two identical drives (one assigned to disk1, and one precleared), hoping that now unRAID would let me assign the precleared drive to disk2 - but still "too many wrong and/or missing disks!"... Anyone has any idea on how I can make unRAID forget about the previous disk2 drive and just use the new one? (obviously I don't care about the "lost data" on disk2, as there isn't any data and that disk) If I can do that, I would be able to repeat preclear on the slightly larger drive and assign it to parity. Thanks, - Itamar.

Yeah, RDM is a good candidate for the issues. I really should install the M1015 I got a couple of days ago and use passthrough instead of RDM. I will definitely try upgrading again after I do that and see if the issue comes back.

I'm not sure it's *just* annoying. Maybe this is an unrelated issue, but during the period of time I was running with RC8, I experienced several "strange directory locks" on random user-share directories. I have no idea if it's related to this issue though. The phenomenon looked sort-of like: 1. I write to some directory in a user share (copy a file) 2. After the file is written, the parent directory is "locked" - meaning I can't access it over SMB ("Access Denied" or something like this). 3. Locally on unRAID the directory seems fine - I can list it, and all files are there with valid mode and ownership. 4. I think restarting unRAID helped for the session (though I'm not sure if I had to revert to beta12a for the issue to go away..) 5. All this happens randomly - sometimes files are written and nothing bad happens. Nothing relevant appeared on the log (same log I attached to the first post).

Hi, I have just upgraded from 5.0-beta12a to RC8, which seemed to be just fine. The array is started and working fine, but on the console I keep getting the following error: SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[] ... I attached a screenshot of the console, and the system log. Running unRAID as VM under ESXi 5.1, with RDM for data drives. - Itamar. unRAID-5.0rc8-post-upgrade-system-log.txt