RobJ

The 6.3 release added the hpsa (HP Smart Array) module, which added support for your H240, just what you needed. But it doesn't appear to be working correctly: * The HP card was recognized and initialized, looks correct, and it's 7 drives were identified and initialized. Their partition tables were read in fine. You started the array in Maintenance mode, quickly stopped it, then started it in regular mode. The BTRFS file systems of the data drives and the Cache Pool (a pair of Patriot SSD's) were all loaded without issue. But only half a minute after array start, the H240 declares a fault and aborts, and many of the connected drives are declared offline, which appears to be fatal for this session. unRAID is not aware the card has stopped (or almost stopped), and tries to read from the drives, which isn't possible now, so numerous read errors are reported instead. Nothing actually wrong with the drives, but they can't be accessed because the card appears to have crashed. Finally BTRFS crashes too when it can't read from the drives, causing the kernel issues. It's hard to make any conclusions yet. You appear to be the first to test hpsa support, so we cannot say whether it's compatible or not. It was added because it was requested. And because a small company can't possibly test every card, it has to rely often on user reports as to what works and what doesn't. It could be a defective card, it could be a defective driver, the card could be incompatible with your motherboard, the driver may be too new and not stable enough yet, or it may not be configured correctly. Look for a firmware update for the card, and see if that helps. You would be MUCH better off going with tried and tested hardware, already known to be compatible! * Check for a newer BIOS for your motherboard, might help. * You have IDE emulation turned on for your onboard SATA drives. When you next boot, go into the BIOS settings and look for the SATA mode, and change it to a native SATA mode, preferably AHCI, anything but IDE emulation mode. It should be slightly faster, and a little safer. You aren't using any of your 4 motherboard SATA ports, but once configured for AHCI, they are your best SATA ports. (The H240 may be better for high performance SSD's though.)

For a version that old, there were extra instructions, and I strongly recommend reading the Upgrading to UnRAID v6 guide, even if you wish to use the plugin to upgrade. You copied syslinux, but I can't tell if you cleaned out the old syslinux files, and you don't mention running make_bootable, something you HAVE to do if you switch syslinux files. For your old version, you are also going to have to run New Permissions. I believe the instructions for the upgrade plugin assume that the user has kept up to date, at least running v5.0, and you were still on an old beta.

Agreed. Those are more bad sectors.

The fact that the drive had 6 and is slow on the post-read may mean it's starting to fail. Zeroing it *may* have fixed those 6, but if the drive is going bad, there may be more now. You can let it complete or stop it, but I would do at least one more Preclear on it, preferably 2 more. You want perfect Preclears, running at normal speed, before you can trust it.

A couple of others have seen it, appears harmless, but until your post, had no clues about the cause. Hopefully now, it will be taken care of.

Some FAQ entries I can think of are: - the cirrus tip (here) - the 'set CPU's to 1' tip for updating Windows - 'if it's not visible click the Advanced button' tip - 192.168.122.x vs 192.168.1.x (here) - probably a whole section on Windows issues - another section on pass-through issues - a reference type FAQ entry - how to get started, pointers to videos and guides, etc

This is the feedback thread for the forum VM FAQ, as we don't want anyone cluttering the FAQ up. Anything that's added to the FAQ that's not a Q with A will be moved to this thread. This is the place for suggestions, complaints, requests for FAQ entries, and any discussion about current FAQ entries. This VM FAQ for unRAID was designed strictly for all virtualization related questions, for any one of our community helpers to add a Frequently Asked Question, with answer. It is based on the existing Docker FAQ and its Docker FAQ Feedback thread.

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I was a bit baffled by the posts above, investigated, spotted the IP's, and figured it out. And I'm not talking!

The Mover is not a program though, it's just a script that runs a series of rsync commands. Perhaps there's an rsync option to show more progress info?

There's one more change to make. Use the expanded sed command in this post.

That would be expected - if a bit of clearing occurred, there's no file system left, so XFS is confused. Shut it down any way you can. Try these in this order, until one works: - at command prompt: powerdown - at command prompt: poweroff - push power button - push and hold power button On the next boot, if it complains of 'unclean shutdown' and wants to start a parity check, just cancel it.

When running this, the following was displayed: Unmounting Disk 1 ... umount: /mnt/disk1: target is busy It still seems to be clearing. What is the purpose of unmounting? The drive must be unmounted before using the dd command. Because unmounting has always worked without issue, I never thought to check for success or failure. I'll need to check that, and abort if not able to unmount the drive. Since it passed the earlier tests, it seems impossible for a file to be open, so the only way I can think of to fail unmounting it is because a terminal or console session was open on the drive, perhaps where you were working before starting the script. I'll need to check for that, and if possible request the console session be closed. I don't know what is happening at the moment, as the drive was probably not unmounted. It appears to be running the dd command, but dd does not provide good error reporting. I do not think it is clearing the drive, so it should be aborted. Because scripts in the foreground seem to hang emhttp (the unRAID core), you will probably have to shut down and reboot. You may have to re-format and prep the drive, then rerun the script, making sure there are no console sessions open, set to a 'current directory' on the drive being cleared.

RobJ, Does this mean that the Unraid team are planning to release a version soon to officially support the H330? My trial version of 6.3.0-rc1 using the megaraid sas driver provided by Tom M is working perfectly as it should here, albeit that I have to manually load it in each time I reboot the server for anything. I don't suppose there's a way for me to sort of add it to the startup code of my server is there? Thanks for an absolutely brilliant program! As a fellow user, I can't speak for Lime Technology. All I can say is that is what they usually do, include it in an upcoming release. It would then be loaded automatically for cards and chipsets it supports.

Why not provide your diagnostics ... see Need help? Read me first! Unassigned Devices should only show what's currently installed.

Try updating the BIOS for your motherboard, and any firmware on attached cards. Also try a long Memtest from the unRAID boot menu.

Fireball3, I've added a note to the first post pointing to the new wiki (Crossflashing Controllers), as I noticed you were starting to link to it. I tried to add the credit due, to both you and madburg. I did not wait to ask his permission, but hope he won't mind my edit. Great work, both of you!

So i have to buy a mini mono card this week. The perc 310 and perc 330 are within 20 bucks of each other. Did you have to do anything special to the H330 other than set it to hba mode in the dell bios? You would have to wait for an unRAID release that includes the new support.

I do have to agree though, that this is a confusing situation. Can we encourage those authors to add an appropriate note to their original posts? If some choose not to, or are not around any more, can we agree on an appropriate note that moderators can add?

As I said, it's gone in 6.2, so no need to look for it. md_write_method is unrelated, not a 'tunable'. There is a fourth tunable - nr_requests, which can make a difference, especially with some hardware. According to earlier testing, reasonable values appear to be 128 or 8 (and possibly 16 or 32), depending on which controllers are present. Well, it's much faster than mine, an older system. We aren't going to know until we have a script designed for 6.2, and then we can all figure out what the best numbers look like, for various hardware.

Ran the script from the above post, selected the 10 minute test, and the full iterations ran for 2 1/2 hours ... results were: Tunable (md_num_stripes): 1280 Tunable (md_write_limit): 768 Tunable (md_sync_window): 384 Basically what I had before, but for some reason "md_write_limit" was blank? I don't have a screen shot, but that's what the tool reported. Anyway, I guess my Cortex server has been running reasonably optimally all along. Good to know, though... Squid updated it so it would run, with 6.2, but it's not actually valid for 6.2. As of 6.2, md_write_limit is gone and md_sync_thresh has been added, with a default value of 192. Your md_sync_window would be fine at 384, twice the value of md_sync_thresh, but would probably show worse performance with higher values of md_sync_window. According to Tom, md_sync_thresh needs to be in the range of (md_sync_window/2) to (md_sync_window-1). We're waiting for an updated tunables script.

The mpt2sas modules (and similar variants) are notorious for horrible error reporting. This is not particular to an unRAID version, or even Preclear (any version or script). I would reconnect the drive off the SAS card, so you can get intelligible error messaging, find out what's wrong. (Doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong with the drive, but there may be.)

I think this is a good idea. It lets anyone customize the response as they wish, and add extra warnings and special notifications, beyond the standard ones. And perhaps start file integrity tools running to begin identifying what's changed.

I would say yes, as it's more likely to cause the major disruption that's appropriate for the potential disaster that's happening! Do you really want to allow something to possibly continue destroying files on networked machines, so long as it doesn't interrupt your movie? If you aren't well backed up elsewhere, then this is comparable to a small fire in the house, or the sound of a thief with your jewelry and valuables.

An instant classic! Old classic. Discovered it was issued back in 1995, don't know why I had never seen it. I suspect the first panel is being cut out by itself and passed to bosses everywhere!