electron286

These posts may be of help in capturing your log, prior to a reboot/crash... http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6801.msg65881#msg65881 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=28316.msg251503#msg251503

Sounds to me like you may have multiple issues with your current unRAID. I would suggest looking at the SMART drive information in detail with no data transferring to, from, or within the array between drives. First, after booting unRAID, go to the web interface and CANCEL the parity check. If the system is not stable or becomes non-responsive after this in the following steps I would look at your power supply, then your RAM... You will likely need to look at the SMART data for EACH drive, but based on your logs and descriptions, I would be most concerned with your; DATA disk2 - ST3500641A 3PM17RN6 (motherboard Primary Master IDE) - reported SMART FAILURE and redballed... DATA disk3 - ST3500641A 3PM103R2 (motherboard Primary SLAVE IDE) - on same bus, may have been a cause, or affected Also look closely at the Parity drive. Look for errors such as bus errors, re-allocated sectors counts, re-allocated event counts, pending reallocations, etc. Assuming you are running unMENU... In unMENU, select MyMain. Within MyMain, select Smart for the current view. This will give an easy place to see your SMART status for each drive. If you are running an older version of unMENU, without the MyMain plugin loaded... In unMENU, select Disk Management. Now you can select each drive, one at a time, from the drop down menu. Select Smart Status Report - The SMART status will be shown for the selected drive below. Look for errors in the SMART Error Log, such as bus errors, etc. Pay close attention to Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Reallocated_Event_Count, and Current_Pending_Sector values (names will vary by manufacturer and model...) Select Short Smart Test to initiate a quick test of the selected drive. WAIT ABOUT 3 MINUTES or longer if it says something longer than... Please wait 2 minutes for test to complete. 3 minutes should normally allow a short test to complete on a good drive... Select Smart Status Report again - The SMART status will be shown for the selected drive below. Near the bottom you will see the results of the short test just completed under SMART Self-test log. look at the LifeTime(hours) column to see the time the test was run, the current one should match with the Power_On_Hours parameter. You can also select Long Smart Test for a much better and more revealing test if needed, it will take a long time...

As far as a RAID controller controlling a staggered spin up goes, many, if not MOST of the older RAID controllers did stagger spin ups, on POWER ON spin up conditions. Some RAID controllers would even be configured as masters, and slaves to insure all drives were spun up in sequence, and that multiple controllers would not spin up their drive at the same time other controllers were. Not sure if that is even available on newer RAID cards, since I always play with newer JBOD array controllers now with unRAID. In the past, and still usually the case, in a true RAID environment, the drives are never spun down again, till the array is taken off line and powered down. So a RAID controller would never do a staggered spin up anyway, exept at power up. The staggered spin up on the RAID controllers I have used, is also tied into the BIOS drive intitialization and discovery phase of the controller boot up process. And I am unaware of any feature on any of the cards I have worked with allowing or providing any means of a staggered spin up of multiple drives if they are subsequently spun down after an OS is in control. So from a hardware point of view... I would say that IF you have controllers that do staggered spin ups of drives, AND the drives are never spun down except to power down the system... Then it should be fine to reduce the power supply size compared to a system that would be spinning up all drives simultaneously. In the past, drives used MUCH more power during spin-up than todays drives. Add to that, the fact that power supplies were also much less efficient than todays power supplies. And it can be seen why staggered drive spinups, while still a very good thing for some reasons, is not as important today as it used to be. I would still like to see user configurable spin-up in unRAID, but would not downsize a power supply because it was there.

That is one very nice looking drive cage! It has just what I have been looking for, an easy to clean lint screen! :-) I think I am leaning toward a bad connection(s) to your drives. Probably on the connectors in your nice cool new cages. With the ROHS initiatives, the old chemicals, and lead, that did such a great job for producing high quality electronics is just not there any more. This has caused two possibilities that I can think of that may be an issue in your situation: 1. Contaminants were not fully cleaned off the backplane PCB, or connectors after assembly, or were flushed INTO the connectors during cleaning. This has been a real problem, that can sometimes be seen by inspection with a good light. Surfaces should look clean, with no streaking, and metal surfaces should be nice and shinny. This can be taken care of with some careful cleaning using a good quality of either rubbing, or de-natured, alcohol. Use a small 'acid' brush with short bristles for best cleaning action. Clean caefully not to disturb any stikers or markings placed on the board, or other assemblies, to avoid voiding any warrantee. Another possible, less desirable solution would be to just relocate any contaminants on the connections by repeatedly plugging and unplugging each connector. This will allow the contact pressure to clean the contacting surface to allow proper electrical connection. The down side here, is that in time, the contaminants that are still present, may migrate and cause problems again in the future... 2. Bad solder connections, due to the less forgiving acceptible temperature range of non-lead containing solder. This is not as much of a problem, usually, in a high volume controlled production environment, but often connectors are MANUALLY soldered in place after all other components have been 'wave' soldered. Again, a good light shining on the suspect areas should reveal if there is a problem. Look for nice shinny solder, with no irregular surfaces, or variations in color. Note that it is unlikely to look as nice as old circuit boards using lead did... If you see bad solder joints, AKA COLD SOLDER JOINTS, you could try to fix them if you are good with a soldering iron... This however will likely void any warrantee you may have however.

Ok, long post, but hopefully will help. Trying to make it a decent step by step... this should help to determine where a problem is... Likely you have done at least some of this, but since I do not know what for sure, here it goes... 1st... Do you have BOTH power supplies connected and operating? If not, set them both up for operation, if there is a problem with one power supply that may be causing your issues... If running only one, you could also try using the other one, but I would use both for the following tests. 2nd... Are you using IPMI, or a local console (direct connected monitor and keyboard)? Use the monitor and keyboard on the machine for these tests... I would try the following, AFTER removing power to the power supplies and draining them by pressing the power button: 1. Remove the small IPMI board. 2. Remove the SATA interfaces. 3. Try booting again with the cards removed. This will speed up the boot process, and also allow you to see if it will be stable or not at this point. Being quicker to boot, will also make it easier and faster to try things from there... When I first powered mine up, I had a hard time getting to the BIOS setup screen. After I removed the IPMI board it was much easier to get things working, then I put the IPMI card back in. This is the oder of steps I would take in checking to make sure all is good, and that new components are also good: 1. You may also need to put revert back to the original CPU and memory, to get to a point to set the BIOS to default. 2. If reverted to OLD CPU and RAM, and you get it running then add JUST half of the new RAM with the old CPU, and make sure it will still works. 3. Then trying again with the 2nd half of the new RAM installed on the old CPU. 4. If there are problems, remove all RAM and try again with old RAM, just to make sure it still works... Then try ONE stick of new RAM at a time. You may also want to run a memory test at this point on each stick... 5. After identifying all new RAM status, as GOOD or BAD... and getting a good stable test, time to try each new CPU... 6. It may be good to again set BIOS to defaults BEFORE swapping the CPU, AND again AFTER... Just to be sure... Somewhere along the way, you should be able to find a problem, if not, it may have been a problem with the BIOS setting up variables and/or tables for the system resources, with the CPU swap. If so, at this point adding the cards back in, first SATA cards... power up test... then add back in IPMI card... all should work...

I had similar thoughts running through my mind as I typed that last reply... I am not sure if it is worth the time to worry about the flash drive, with how cheap they are now. But it can be interesting trying to get things to work again, and often something valuable can be learned from it... Yesterday I was looking at a cool 32MB USB Flash I had gotten a few years back as a premium from Microsoft. I thought about how small it is, compared to most of my needs now... Then realized I could put the full contents from an old Iomega Beta 20 cartridge ont, and still have over 10 MB free! Things sure do change... I guess, that is just how computers and technology are. :-) I remember thinking how cool it was to have a floppy that could hold almost 10 times the amount of data that I could hold in RAM! Why would anyone need to use anything more than 64KB of RAM for anything other than a RAM DISK?...

You are welcome, :-) YEA! I am also happy to see it is now operational! I know it can get really depressing, buying new cool toys, and not finding a way to get them to work! Been there a few times myself over the years... :-) It is really great to have a wonderful group of people willing and able to help out like we have on these forums!

You may be able to find a similar repair utility on the website for the manufacturer of the USB FLASH drive you have. If not, you may be able to determine which chip type is in it, and find a utility that way...

Not all ATOMs are 64-bit. Most of the early ones are 32-bit. But of the motherboards currently available in the supply chain, MOST are 64-bit. If looking at an ATOM, I would strongly suggest going with the D2560, if looking for a solution that is less likely to be obsoleted as soon, as it also supports, Intel VT-x for virtualization. :-) The D2560 is a dual-core, quad-threaded(dual core with hyper-threading = 4 threads) x86 CPU with VT-x that runs under 10W. Not bad, and a very tempting pick! The D2560 processor is the same price to the OEM as the less capable D2550, and is the only one, (that I can seem to find at least), in the ATOM line-up to support hardware virtualization. BUT... While there are a boards currently in production with the D2560, they do not seem to have trickeled down the supply chain yet for us poor little consumers to buy... :-( That is to say I do not see any at Newegg, etc... All the currently stocked ATOM based motherboards at Newegg (2013 Jul 07) ARE 64-bit however, and you would need to search for an older 32-bit varient. If looking at for an ATOM, I would wait till I could get the D2560, and use something else to get by with for cheap till then.

true, true... I think if you are going to need to buy hard drives also for testing, it would be a bad idea to go for IDE drives at all. But, free is free, and if you find newer FREE hardware, that may also have a drive or two, and has SATA ports... I would definitely if it a go for seeing what unRAID will do for you. Then if you desired, you could still buy a newer SATA drive for use in the test machine, that could be moved to a newer nicer unRAID build later after you have decided it is a great way to go... Got to love unRAID, with how easy it is to move your drives from one machine to another without loosing your array! :-)

If you really want cheapest... Go with all old/recycled parts... part cost should be ZERO that way... or very, very close to it. Then the only expense would be a license for unRAID. If he is unsure unRAID is what he wants, he can even just go for the free version of unRAID too, and just use 2 data drives with parity for now, to see how he likes it! I am thinking about starting a new thread... something titled like "GARBAGE/LANDFILL CHEAP BUILDS..." hardware that without unRAID might very well just end up in a landfill. :-( There are very functional builds that can be built still using P4 era hardware... They WILL use more power than many current builds, at least compared to the capability of the system. But they are a great way to see if unRAID will work for a given user, or not... It is also a great way to build a protected array cheap, that may only be powered on for purposes of making additional back-ups of data, and such...

Do the CoolerMaster 4-in-3 cages, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993002, have a filter that can be removed and cleaned WITHOUT needing to remove the drive chassis? I just can not tell from the pictures I have been able to find. It looks like it 'might' be possible... If not, does anyone know of a 4-in-3, or 3-in-3 drive chassis that does have removable filters for cleaning without needing to remove the chassis each time?

It looks like you bought FORWARD breakout cables, made to BREAKOUT from the mini SAS SFF-8087 connector on a mother-board or controller, TO 4 SATA/SAS drives. What you need is the REVERSE breakout cables, Which COMBINES (not breaks out), 4 SATA ports from a mother-board or controller, TO a mini SAS SFF-8087 connector. such as this one... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133033

Looking at your BIOS configuration options in your posted picture... I think you may also need to DISABLE the "Stop on error" setting. With some RAID cards, if the array is not valid, not set yet, or has a bad/missing drive, it halts the boot process. Then depending on the exact failure as it has detected, it MAY provide various boot options to select from if an actual configured array is available to then boot from. This checking would occur BEFORE any actual BOOT options are allowed to occur that may be set in the motherboard BIOS. So it looks to me, like a drive attached, which is NOT configured in the RAID array of the card, with NO array otherwise configured is indeed a RAID error, as far as the card is concerned. This is not unusual for some RAID cards... If NO drive is attached, it again is more common for a RAID card to just pass control to the next item in the boot sequnce, rather than "forcing" the user to take action with a failed, missing, misconfigured array attached to the RAID controller.

For testing purposes... I would wait to buy, unless you find something cheap you would want to use for another purpose later. You can also just check around and see if anyone has an older computer they want to just get rid of for free. Like was already posted, if an old computer was an XP era machine it should work well for unRAID. This would be an easy and CHEAP way to test what unRAID will really do for you, before you decide what you may want to buy, or re-use for your actual unRAID configuration to use as a "real" system. :-) The main things to look for for a test machine, in my opinion are: 1. That the mother board can BOOT from a USB flash drive. I have a few machines that CAN NOT boot from USB, that CAME with XP installed on them from the manufacturer, and has NO BIOS update available to allow it either... (P4 socket 755, with hyper-threading) So not as old of an XP machine as could be had, but a headache to boot USB. A BOOT CD using a boot loader like PLOP Boot Manager, can be used to boot from, then in turn allow booting from USB, then after booting they also do work well with unRAID. 2. That the motherboard has hard drive interface ports that will work with your test hard drives... IDE or SATA will be fine for this. Just so you have drives that will work with the mother-board. 3. Two or three test hard drives. They can be very small, and smaller the better I feel for testing, since it will take less time to prepare and do some real testing to see how you like unRAID. But any size will be fine. This will allow you to play with Parity, and even see what happens with drive loss, (just remove a drive after a power down - then reboot). Then you will be able to see the real magic of unRAID! :-) 4. NIC to use on your network. 5. Video, either on-board, or add-on will be good. Finally, even though ultimately you may run unRAID headless, (no monitor, keyboard, mouse) for initial set-up and testing it is much easier to have a seperate monitor, and keyboard on the unRAID system, (or a KVM switch). As far as how much of a machine is needed to run unRAID, I have test machines running well on OLD 386 hardware with 256MB of RAM... They have no problems streaming videos, that are compressed. Too slow for larger higher bit-rate videos however. Not because of the CPU and RAM, but even larger files would be, but I am hitting the limit on the very small old IDE hard drives in the machines. I would not even consider for your purposes of testing anything less than a motherboard with a P4 3.0 Ghz, with Hyper-threading. I think you will be very impressed at that point already, as long as you also test with hard drives of the same age or newer. For testing, It would also be good to go through the full recommended procedure of pre-clearing the drives before use. It will help you get familier with the process, and also test the old drives that you may end up testing for the test system. There is nothing wrong with FREE and very minimal for testing. That way you can know just how much a very limited system can do, and that you can expect more performance with newer hardware! I am always amazed at how many videos I can stream at the same time from rather old hardware! :-) unRAID is much more efficient at streaming out files than any tests on various versions of Windows on the same hardware that I have tested. (tests using Windows 98, 98SE, ME, NT 3.x, NT 4, 2000, XP)

Sounds like you found the problem then... Of course, you never know for sure unless it happens again, then you can probably assume you did not find the problem, or you have multiple issues... oh, the fun of intermittent problems. At least your problem was occuring rather regularly. :-) I also have a TRendnet Gb switch I retired some time ago, it was acting much like you describe. I did not notice if the timing of disconnects was consistant like you had or not however. I remember running in circles a little while with it too...

just did a search, and found this post that may be of interest... http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6801.msg65881#msg65881 It is not directly releated, but seems to still have the functionality that may be needed for log capture.

There was another post somewhere... I can't seem to find it now, that also did a similar thing to re-direct... a copy of the syslog. so if the one in the ZIP does not do quite what you want, you may want to search a little. Of course, you may not need it since you found you are having memory errors. Also, you may need to use caution in where you send the log to, you do not want to write all the time to your flash drive used to boot unRAID, it will shorten the live of the flash memory.

OK, the link came back and network functions are fully restored as I expected after the parity check completed. I will swap out the current Realtek based Gb NIC and replace it with an Intel Gb NIC. But I expect all will be good then. CPU utilization was well below 25% average during the times I looked at it during the parity check, and the RAM also had no problems, and still had LOTS left... NO errors logged at all in the system log, and all went well with no parity errors either, as usual. Hardware information update: System has: CPU: Intel® Pentium® Dual CPU E2180 @ 2.00GHz RAM: 2GB, (not sure when I added that...) Would have still had no problems with 512MB during the parity check... NIC: Driver;r8169, NO ERRORS LOGGED. RX packets:3567 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2313 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 HD: Status Disk Mounted Device Model Reads Writes Errors Size Used %Used Free OK parity /dev/sde SAMSUNG_HD154UI_ 5282914 47 OK /dev/md1 /mnt/disk1 /dev/sdf SAMSUNG_HD154UI_ 5481154 6 1.50T 1.31T 88% 194.51G OK /dev/md2 /mnt/disk2 /dev/sdg SAMSUNG_HD154UI_ 4741222 6 1.50T 1.31T 88% 187.28G OK /dev/md3 /mnt/disk3 /dev/sda ST31500541AS_ 4911542 5 1.50T 1.25T 84% 247.92G OK /dev/md4 /mnt/disk4 /dev/sdh ST31000340AS_ 3307029 5 1.00T 924.22G 93% 75.96G OK /dev/md5 /mnt/disk5 /dev/hda ST3750640A_ 1601459 5 750.13G 747.23G 100% 2.91G OK /dev/md6 /mnt/disk6 /dev/hdb ST3750640A_ 1590664 6 750.13G 720.68G 97% 29.45G OK /dev/md7 /mnt/disk7 /dev/sdb ST3750640AS_ 2305626 5 750.13G 470.80G 63% 279.34G OK /dev/md8 /mnt/disk8 /dev/sdc ST3750640AS_ 2024220 6 750.13G 723.65G 97% 26.48G OK /dev/md9 /mnt/disk9 /dev/sdd ST3750640AS_ 2493748 5 750.13G 606.06G 81% 144.07G NOTE: Parity check ran for 12:21:18...

Interesting developement... It is looking like resources are NOT the problem. Looks like I have another bad GB Ethernet card. I think this was the last of my REALTEK add-in cards that I was going to replace with an Intel one. I have had many failures with the GB Realteks over the last year, and this one has not seemed to be a problem with data transfers, so it had not yet been replaced. After the parity check is over, I will see if the ethernet comes back to life or not, and replace the card either way. I had never looked to see if I had lost the link or not in the past, but it is not there now. Tried different GOOD cables, and switched to a different switch, also known to be good with no prior operational issues, at one point the link apeared for about 1 second, then went off again. If this is what has been happening in the past with my parity checks, it is an odd issue indeed. I do know the Realtek uses more CPU resources than the Intel NICs, possibly there is a timing issue with the failing NIC, that is needs quicker CPU response to properly work... Will post again after Parity check and further NIOC testing... and swap...

I also have seen a couple instances with newer, lower vertical resolution, cheaper LCD, (LED backlit), 16:9 monitors not being able to display some 4:3 resolution modes...

Another possibly better option, might be to try a different monitor on the problem system. What monitor brand and model is the one that has been used for testing so far? If we know that we also can learn what video modes it supports.

So, I would say it is very possible that with some combinmations of video card, BIOS, and monitor, the resolution MAY also change under some situations, not just the vertical refresh rates... I am going to pull out an older monitor and see what happens... It looks to me like the current problem joeyke87 is having, may just be the case of the monitor not being able to operate with the signal presented, even if the unRAID envirnment is booting properly...

Ok, just did some quick testing on one of my newer systems, with an older monitor... Note that results will likely CHANGE based on what video chip is in use, and BIOS versions and such... and even possibly what monitor is connected and if the video card supports reckoginition of the monitor modes before an actual video driver is loaded at the OS level, etc... BUT... in my first test... the video resolution seemed to stay the same throughout the POST and BOOT process to the login prompt. I say seemed, because the VERTICAL frequency, (refresh rate), kept changing between 60 and 70 Hz. So if there was also a quick resoultion change somewhere in there, I would not have been able to see it, since the monitor blanked out at each mode change, till it was again stable, then operated in the new mode, till it changed yet again!

Does unRAID change resolutions during the booting process? Could it be switching to a mode unsupported by the monitor? I have noticed that some combinations of video chiopsets, and drivers do at times also change what resolution mode is selected at command prompts while booting into windows... BEFORE Windows actually brings up a GUI... could this be the case here?