Auggie

Experiencing a high incident rate of Windows 10 Pro hanging immediately upon boot before it POSTs (black screen with non-blinking underscore cursor). It happens almost all the time, but after a forced stop, it subsequently starts up successfully. And this is with a brand new install with no third party or other applications installed yet. I used the latest virtual drivers available through unRAID's VM management tools. Only 1 CPU is assigned, out of a possible 2. And a first: While drafting this post, it just hanged at the blue Windows logo screen after restarting during it's first Windows update process. I initiated the Windows Update again, which upon the typical restart to continue updating, it went straight to the frozen underscore cursor screen. Since it always hangs during startup, I can't get a proper Windows update installed because I have to force the VM to stop, after which when I finally successfully get it to startup it rolls back any updates to the previous version. This is really unacceptable for me as I require reliable unattended operations (I've set it to auto-logon). Curious if anyone else is experiencing this issue, and if so, what solutions may have worked to resolved this. So far, this does not bode well in my first VM foray with Win10 as I need a stable VM that will reliably boot and operate. I only intend to run custom software that I've created to manage my media library jukebox, so I'm willing to downgrade to Windows 7 if that offers the stability and reliability I need and this is not an unRAID VM issue specific to any OS...

Thanks for that! Didn't know to check the CPU specs since the BIOS allows me to enable VT-d; you'd think that if that feature wasn't available, the BIOS shouldn't allow that option. Any who, now that I just setup my very first VM (Windows 10) I was planning to change the CPU eventually to at least get more cores than the current dual-core setup.

I enabled both Virtualization Technology and VT-d in BIOS (latest version as of Dec 2016) but unRAID still shows IOMMU as "Disabled." Presently, I don't have any PCI devices that need to be passed through but I'm curious if the "Disabled" status is because of that, if unRAID somehow does not recognize that VT-d is actually active in BIOS, or if this board is somehow incompatible with unRAID's IOMMU functionality. This is for future endeavors in case I expand the role of this server which may require PCI passthrough.

Flashed worked successfully! Though with the original subject specifically targeting the X9SCM boards (which I have), I was simply following along the steps of the original post which went straight straight to flashing the M1015 while in DOS command line, which immediately resulted in errors. Silly me that I didn't initially read the follow-up post that provided instrux for UEFI shell, needed for boards with UEFI like the X9SCM. FYI, there are newer X9SCM BIOS and IPMI firmwares than the ones provided in this thread, R2.2 and R3.38 respectively, as of December 2016.

Although it seems a relatively simple process, I don't have any PC's to flash the HBA's other than my headless unRAID servers, both of which have SuperMicro mobo's that utilize Java-based IPMI in which the Java applet has been extremely unstable and crashes constantly on my OS X computers. So, I would have to create a bootable flash drive and connect a monitor and keyboard in a cramped, low ceiling storage closet where my RPC-4224 machine resides (or temporarily haul it out onto a table).

unRAID will do it's magic based on software. The controller hardware has to simply provide the drives to the OS. Hardware RAID is not necessary and will not work. Some hardware in this thread may be obsolete, but the fact that a controller card has to run in IT mode is still valid. Thanks. I think I understand now; basically, the HBA must allow "JBOD" (which is the term that I've usually looked for when selecting an HBA card). I had purchased the M1015 last year from a recommendation on these forums in another unrelated thread but it wasn't mentioned that I may have to flash the card (it's brand new). I paid $140 but I just compared prices and an LSI SAS9211-8I is going for $112 new; it seems that's the better option as it's cheaper and is already just a plain JBOD HBA with no RAID functions (which flashing the M1015 essentially makes it into a SAS9211-8I with the FW provided by OP).

Thanks for all the info! I'm glad unRAID provides all the necessary functions to remotely access the VM desktop, while having the option to use RDP if I so choose to.

I want to create a Windows (any flavor of 7, 8 or 10) VM on my headless unRAID v6.x host machine, and subsequently access the Windows VM desktop remotely. I will only be running custom software I wrote (which runs only on Windows and OS X) that manages and automates my media library jukebox that the unRAID machine stores. Having never implemented VM's through unRAID, does unRAIDs' web GUI have the tools to remotely access the Windows VM desktop? The box physically resides in a storage closet so I want to avoid having to have a monitor connected. Or would I have to implement a VNC setup on the Windows VM and access it through a VNC client from the remote device?

I, too, recently picked up an M1015 card but haven't installed it. Is it necessary to flash this card for unRAID v6.x? Or can it be plugged-and-played? And if it is plug-n-play, is flashing to IT mode simply for better throughput? In general, how relevant is the OP's information regarding the various LSI controllers for v6.x?

I can now confirm that the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 is indeed compatible with the RES2SV240. I now have 2 SAS2LP plus the RES2SV240 connecting my 24 SATA drives with no issues thus far, having completed a data-rebuild on one drive. Even though the mobo has 4 PCIe slots, only 2 are x8, and for some unknown reason, I would get rare and intermittent errors with any SAS2LP in the x4 slots as I started upgrading to greater than 2TB drives.

FYI, I went ahead and purchased a M1015. I only have a week to work on the box when I get home for Spring Break starting this coming Friday, which includes having to rebuild parity with in incoming 8TB drive (about a day), then replace a 4TB with the previous 6TB parity drive (just over a day), then run a parity check to make sure the expansion was accurately completed (about 2 days). If I wait until then to find out the SM HBA doesn't support port multiplication, then I'm screwed as I don't have time to wait for the new board (while spending a hefty price to get it overnighted). I will first see if the SM HBA does work with the Expander card and report back my findings.

Does anyone know if the SuperMicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 supports the Intel RAID expander card RES2SV240? I already have the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8's so would prefer not having to buy an IBM M1015 to replace an otherwise perfectly functional SAS/SATA card.

What are the commands you added to the go script to get this running on cron? I don't remember where I found this, but I'm using the following in my go script: # Load adapter drivers: modprobe ipmi-si # Load chip drivers: modprobe coretemp modprobe w83627ehf # Insert unraid-fan-speed.sh into crontab chmod +x /boot/scripts/unraid-fan-speed.sh crontab -l >/tmp/crontab grep -q "unraid-fan-speed.sh" /tmp/crontab 1>/dev/null 2>&1 if [ "$?" = "1" ] then crontab -l | egrep -v "control unRAID fan speed based on temperature:|unraid-fan-speed.sh" >/tmp/crontab echo "#" >>/tmp/crontab echo "# control unRAID fan speed based on temperature" >>/tmp/crontab echo "*/2 * * * * /boot/scripts/unraid-fan-speed.sh 1>/dev/null 2>&1" >>/tmp/crontab cp /tmp/crontab /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root- crontab /tmp/crontab fi The problem is unRAID 5 is choking on this line "/tmp/crontab /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root-" (specifically, something to do with the root account) and reports this constantly in the syslog. So I'm trying to understand the logic behind this copy command followed by the crontab command in order to modify it to work under unRAID 5, though even with these errors, the script appears to still be running in a timely fashion and correctly adjusting my fans.