thespooler

I'm shocked as well. The HSTs were not formatted at all. The Seagate was FAT32 prior to the preclear. There is a BIOS and CMOS backup option, but it's to NVRAM. If I disable SATA, I can boot, if I plug in the original Windows drive, I can boot. With the 4TB drives I'm stuck at the "Press DEL to enter BIOS, Press ESC to enter Boot Menu" option. I was kind of surprised 4TB drives worked, maybe it's an Advanced Format issue, if Unraid aligned the drives?

I'm experimenting with the trial copy of Unraid. I'm using an old NF4 board, specifically the DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra D. It booted my 2 4TB HGST NAS drives no problem. I spent a few days in Unraid playing around. And I shut it down so I could run preclear on a Seagate 4TB I just removed from an external case. When I started the system back up, it would POST, the drives would be detected, but I couldn't enter set up or continue. I could CTRL-ALT-DEL, but otherwise it was hung. Through trial and error and combinations of cables, nothing worked so I removed the HGST drives and just started up with the Seagate attached. Ran preclear, 120 hours later, it's done, I restart, and now the Seagate has the same problem. It's pretty clear at this point, that the BIOS is trying to do something with the XFS file system and ends up hung. Have others experienced this? I tried turning off all HD settings that might circumvent the issues (booting, smart, etc) but haven't lucked into any setting that has worked. I'll try hot plugging them when Unraid is running. But not sure this motherboard supports that. Any ideas?

I installed the plugin and the original script from this thread. My parity check is currently running. Guess I have to delete the parity and data drive I have set up so far and run preclear on them once they're back to being unassigned.

Thanks guys. Using preclear is not part of the getting started guide for 6 that I'm following so how do I proceed?

Hello, I'm giving Unraid a trial. I've been lurking for a while and have read many references to the preclear script, I understand it's purpose for hot spares, but for a brand new array with brand new drives, it seems like it would also be a good idea?