MrLeek

I'll give it a try first - if nothing else it will help my learning curve. Two thoughts though: is it as literal as you've made it sound in case I get stuck part way through? Secondly, is there any danger to the existing data? If there's an element of risk then I might as well grab a new HD.

Edit: Incredibly rude not to thank a guru for dropping by - so thank you! Well the good news is that the SMART report said "Passed" - however the screenshot doesn't inspire confidence: I seemed to remember seeing those Pre-fail messages when I ran preclear on the initial build (I even posted one of the results for comment). So a bit more wiki investigating and I ran the short smartctl test: smartctl -d ata -tshort /dev/sda Which gave me this: If I understand this correctly (and I REALLY want confirmation or mocking as appropriate - it's the only way to learn! ) I've got 2 reallocated sectors but a ton of read errors. I'm wondering therefore if the SMART firmware has done it's job and was able to work around it. The bulk of the read errors probably came from my first parity check following the power failure (the UI flagged up around 11,000) which might explain the high number of read errors. This plus the fact that no errors have been logged is giving me a little hope... I also did the same thing on the other drive in my setup (I'm planning to add drives as required) and got no reallocated sectors or read errors. I'm thinking the longer SMART test might be worth running, but I await the advice of a guru before proceeding!

Hate /bumping my own thread (feels like something a teenager would do ) but I'm still wary of this problem. I've run 2 parity checks now (with a 3rd ongoing). Each reports back that there are no errors, but the error count next to the parity drive keeps increasing - 13,000 and counting. Feels a little confusing, so I'm doubting what I'm reading: unRaid has found and fixed these errors for me, and I need to stop panicing... ...and yes, I'm now in the market for a UPS - most likely a APC Power-Saving ES 550VA. Great way to learn how important a UPS is....

Still a bit of a newbie myself but http://homeservershow.com/wd-ears-drives.html explains how you set the jumpers (and why you need to do it). There's also a big discussion on the unRAID forum about it (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5384.0). If it's any help I'm using 2 x 2TB Caviar Green EARS drives in my setup and I've been more than happy with them. Not using a cache drive yet so I can't comment on that.

That's the way I understand it as well - on my own setup I've got Disk Shares set to Export Read/Write and mine is behaving normally (well - aside from the errors that appeared following a power cut ) Then again I'm also a newbie; I'm sure a guru will be along to explain it soon!

After the power got tripped in my house (faulty surge protector) I ran my parity check as usual (run one every month) only to find that I've got 2,700 errors and counting (about 15% of the drive still to do). Some quick searching and reading on the forums tell me that these errors will be automatically fixed - i.e. it's not just "you've got errors", it's "I found and fixed some errors". Just a parity drive and a single data drive thus far in my setup. Is that correct? One of those silly newbie questions that I promised myself to try and compile as a wiki page for the other newbies out there...

This method works rather well on sites like http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/index.php - no need to register to access many of the boards, but you have to be registered to "thank" a poster.

Ironic, isn't it? It's not mis-spelled, just not the expected word if American English was intended. (But who knows, it may be a British "thing" ) I spelt "thing" correctly - but of course I meant "this"

Some nice points here. I would try to keep in mind an overall format, but it's not massively important and a format tends to appear from a large wiki editing project such as thing. I didn't intend to say "set the format first", but what I wrote did read that way. In short, people should just write articles on things that need to be done (e.g. how to run and read a preclear script) and link it into other parts of the wiki. The latter is important; if your masterpiece doesn't link anywhere then few people will find it. And you Americans can't spell anyway!!

I did - had some REALLY old hd's lying around (one was 3GB! ) so I "borrowed" the jumpers from them. That did bring me onto another question though - where do you get the jumpers if you don't have spare HD's? If memory serves the drives I bought were OEM, but since the jumpers are only needed for unraid builds you might have to source your own jumpers. A quick Google search picked out a few places in the UK that sold jumpers - e-buyer does 100 for £3.64. This seems to be the best price per item. I can't speak for other markets, but I'm sure they can be sourced...even it it's from e-bay. Yes ok - the experts knew this already....but there's bound to be a newbie like me wondering where they get the jumpers from!

Shout if you got stuck - I had a similar problem on my build (only finished it 2 weeks ago) and solved it. I did a more detailed post on how to setup the USB stick from Win 7; I'll find the link later (I'm late for work now!! )

I'm planning to contribute to the writing part of this - I'm not expert enough to answer many of the questions, but I can take the wiki links to the forums are help create some wiki articles. It's perfectly fine for a knowledge base to go from forums -> unofficial wiki pages -> official web pages (that can't be edited). What I would suggest is that experts and newbies alike highlight which are the important areas to "fix" so we can prioritise the work. The other one is to remember that linking to other wikipages is just fine - for example: -Main Pages - How to install UnRaid - Testing and initial troubleshooting - Recommended builds - etc. - etc. Basically, don't copy a format because it's "official" and try and fit everything onto one wiki page - particularly since the official version is reportedly out of date.

Looks good Rajahal (and has a lot of similarities to the build I've just completed). I've added the Asus M4A78L-M as a mobo option (it's a few pounds cheaper than the Biostar at the moment - ok, and I'm using it! ). I never found the Biostar board when I ordered my component list... I've also put in a modular PSU option as well (450W Corsair CMPSU-450HXUK) - although there may be cheaper/better options out there.

I thought I'd report in I ended up with WD EARS 2TD drives in the end, partly as the Samsung drive I wanted was out of stock for over a week. Otherwise the component list was as described in an earlier post. The build went really well, however, I did have a few moments when trying to get the USB stick to boot up (a combination of not being in Administrator mode for the command line and some BIOS settings). Preclear and memory test were fine and it's been running without a reboot for over a week now with no issues and it's all configured to stream movies to the HTPC in the living room. That's about it I think. I've been meaning to do a more detailed write up on the things I learned - hopefully the other newbies out there will benefit. All told the build was fairly easy- as long as I took my time and thought about what I was doing it was all good. I've attached my syslog for the experts out there to comment on. 4.5.3 allows you to get the syslog by entering http://tower/log/syslog into a browser window - but saving it into a text file caused it to lose the CR formating. (I'm probably having a dumb moment on the text formatting - but I'm still recovering from the flu! ) Thanks guys! syslog.txt

Same here (Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit) - the big problem I had was getting a Administrator command prompt. Once I solved that (which only took 10 mins) everything was fine.

It's worth going though the BIOS step by step to get the USB stick to be the bootable device. For example, my Asus board required you to set the boot device as "Removable media", but you also have to specify what type of removable media it is in another part of the BIOS. That's a little from memory, but it's worth checking. It might also be worth redoing the USB stick. Ensure that you get into the command line via Administrator - I had a similar problem to yours. Bring up the start menu and search for "command" - the command prompt link should appear. Right-click and select "run as administrator". If the file path that is displayed is C:\windows\system32 then you're running the administrator command prompt. If it reads something like c:\Users\username then the syslinux file won't work. Then again, I'm not much further along the unRAID journey!

Thought so (phew!) - hopefully the other newbies out there can use these normal results to help understand their own results.

Just a sanity check please folks - my understanding thus far is that all is good on both drives (the reports were identical - aside from the fact that one drive took 3 hours longer to complete the script. This is the longer of the two). Both drives are WD EARS (2TB) and are both brand new: I think there's some issues with my router - it keeps dropping the wireless connection on a regular basis. Although this script was run via wired-ethernet, this might be signs of a bigger problem....

Yep - just solved it! I was using /dev /sda (notice the space).... Got it running using Putty on the first HDD (which will be my parity drive). I'll create a second Putty instance (i think!) and do the same on the second HDD (data drive 1) Cheers for the quick response Joe!

Maybe I'm just being stupid (very good possibility!) but how do you run this? This is my first unraid build (everything is fine so far). I've got the preclear_disk.sh script on the usb stick and my limited knowledge of linux tells me that bash doesn't know where the script is located in order to run it. (I'm still reading as I'd like to solve this myself, but chances are it's a obvious solution to everyone but me!) Edit: something like cd /boot....... stupid welshman! It recognises the command now, but I need to specify the hard drives now

I'm about to start building tomorrow (cleared out all the old junk that was in the case I'm using - I might post a photo of the utter carnage of cable management that greeted me when I opened the case!! ) and I've got a couple of quick questions: 1) Does Joe L's preclear_disk.sh script run from a terminal window from another PC? I've got 2 x 2TB drives that will need to run this so it will take a while. Can the script run on both drives at the same time? (I just want to be 100% clear on how this part is done and how the script is run). 2) Are there any danger/warning signs to look for whilst building or testing? I found bjp's great step-by-step guide, but there's a number of testing phases which could throw some error messages or highlight problems. In all fairness I'm probably worrying about nothing in 2) - I've scanned the Troubleshooting guide and it seems to cover a lot of the potential problems. But, whilst I understand the process behind preclear_disk.sh, I'm not totally clear on how I run it. Maybe I've missed something in the notes.... Thanks all - and wish me luck for tomorrow!

I actually looked for that Biostar board and couldn't find anywhere in the UK that I could trust to sell it (now someone will prove me wrong! ). Otherwise I switched the HD's around (1 x WD and 1 x Samsung) and placed the order - I found that I was only making tiny savings so I chose to ran with it. Wish me luck guys! I'll keep you all posted...

Thanks for the reply Joe - and I'm way ahead of you. Currently looking at an Asus M4A78L-M and Sempron 140 CPU instead to see if that is up to the task. I hadn't considered what would happen if the drive that contained the HPA was damaged (or removed); I was just looking at the start of an unRAID build - which is where I'm starting from. Add the scenarios that you've described - and something like it is almost certain to happen during the lifetime of the raid - and the result could be disaster. What bothers me is that it's not clear from Gigabyte which boards come with this feature and the BIOS option to turn it off is not obvious. I spend around 30 minutes looking at the manual for the GB board I was going to use and I still couldn't tell if it had HPA. Maybe I'm dumb...

Thanks for the advice Kaygee. The prices that I quoted were just general guidelines - what I noticed that the price difference between 1.5TB and 2TB was about the same, regardless of manaufacturer. I've done some more investigation, in part as I'm worried about the Gigabyte HPA issue biting me on the backside, and I've come up with an updated list of components. It's using an AMD processer this time; I've used AMD's in the past but not for some years, so feel free to highlight any issues: Asus M4A78L-M AMD Sempron 140 1Gb Corsair XMS (PC2-6400) Corsair 450w PSU 2 x 2TB Samsung Spinpoint F3EG (parity and data) The components do show up on the hardware compatability list, so I think I'm fairly safe with this option. But my knowledge on AMD processors is more limited so I welcome any thoughts. This route should give me an upgrade path as I add more data to the server (mainly movies!) by just adding more hard drives. Thanks guys!

Don't buy a Gigabyte MB. Oh, I feel the same! I am very angry at Gigabyte for this whole HPA fiasco. To be honest, this issue is making me rethink my choice of using a Gigabyte board. Whilst you should be able to turn it off in the BIOS (as unraided has pointed out) the mobo manual is seriously lacking details on how to do it. The feature is great for a desktop, but a server is different. I am curious if my newbie solution could avoid the problem; I've had several Gigabyte boards before and they've all been great. Moreover, if you could predict which HD the HPA will appear on. But sadly my focus has to be on getting unRAID working for me. As a result I'm updating my choice of components. I've dropped it in my final hardware check thread, so please comment accordingly.