[CLOSED] Need help with booting unRAID with Asus M4A78LT-M LE

[bobekdj]

Hey Guys, in desperate need of help to get my server back up. Had a gigabyte atom board previously and it worked great for ~8 months then wouldnt boot. Lucky I had everything in warranty so I took everything back and wound up with the following setup:

 

Asus M4A78LT-M LE

AMD Athlon II x2 255

Crucial 1GB DDR3PC3-10300 (DDR3-1333) (two of these)

Thermaltake case

Coolermaster extreme 500w psu

 

Good components so I shouldn't have any issues (i have seen similar boards and components work first boot). (but with all these issues i am wondering if intel would be a better choice than amd)... any advice on this?   now on to the real problem.

 

FYI i have disabled pretty much EVERYTHING in my BIOS, and have no HDDs in the tower for troubleshooting. Also have created a new install of unRAID 4.7 AiO

 

Dont know how i can get the log i see up other than typing by hand, so i hope you all can tell me what i am missing here which is causing me to not be able to get past the initial boot screen:

 

 

Computer boots to usb fine, loads bzimage, then bzroot... ready fine, then i get this output on my screen:

 

 

 

Console: colour VGA+ 80x25

console [tty0] enabled

HPET: 4 timers in total, 1 timers will be used for per-cpu timer

Fast TSC calibration using PIT

Detected 3114.197 MHz processor

Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 6228.39 BogoMIPS (lpj=31141970)

Mount-cache hash table entries: 512

CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)

CPU: L2 Cache: 1024K (64 bytes/line)

CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0

CPU: Processor Core ID: 0

mce: CPU supports 6 MCE banks

using C1E aware idle routine

Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.

SMP alternatives: switching to UP code

ACPI: Core revision 20090903

..TIMER: vector=0x30 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1

CPU0: AMD Athlon II X2 255 Processor stepping 03

Brought up 1 CPUs

Total of 1 processors activated (6228.39 BogoMIPS)

NET: Registered protocol family 16

ACPI: bus type pci registered

Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint

[move]_ (blinking hangup of doom)[/move]

 

 

Any help/troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated... i have spent about 6+ hours on google, and trying various boot options...

 

Thank you in advance for your help

-D

[rich.bingham]

I think that board may have an incompatible Atheros NIC.  I'm not sure how unRAID behaves in that case, but if you have a PCI NIC handy that could be something to check quickly (disable onboard LAN first).

[bobekdj]

that was my initial thought as well, so i went ahead and disabled it to see if it would boot :-)

 

no dice though its hanging either way (with onboard NIC enabled or disabled)

[bcbgboy13]

1. Go into the BIOS, load the "default" values, save them and upon reboot run Memtest overnight (the other option on the boot menu).

 

 

[bobekdj]

i can do that, but how will it help me again?

[bcbgboy13]

Chances are you have a bad memory or misconfigured one. If this is OK they you can try to boot with a different USB drive

[bobekdj]

The memory is brand new, and i have tried to boot with 2 different brand usb drives (cruzer micro and ocz rally 2)

 

could it still be bad if it was brand new?

[rich.bingham]

Yes it can, although not likely.  I'd recommend running Memtest from a USB boot drive on all new builds to burn it in.

 

1. Go into the BIOS, load the "default" values, save them and upon reboot run Memtest overnight (the other option on the boot menu).

 

well obviously I was skimming the thread    I also forgot Memtest was on the unRAID flash drive, no need to follow my link.

[bobekdj]

excelent i will do this then.

 

in your opinion, would you stick with amd or get an intel if i can do either for an unraid install?

[Rajahal]

Both AMD and Intel are fine for unRAID.  Don't go through the hassle of swapping just because of brand allegiance.  I think the bigger issue you'll find is that your board's onboard NIC is incompatible with unRAID.  While you could get by using a PCI NIC instead, you might want to consider a different motherboard instead.

[Bags]

I have the same board and have not had any problems, I did know about the NIC problem and bought a cheap one. I have not had any problems with this board. I am however using the semp 140. I would recheck all the connections then maybe check to see if the mem is seated? Maybe its just a bad board? Does it pass the post test? My first biostar board did not.

[bobekdj]

Yeah posted fine, would get farther than my first one (biostar) would...

 

I ended up taking back to my local retailer and picked up a different biostar (A780L3G) and it started up without any problems at all and my raid was up and running on COMPLETELY new hardware in less than 2 hours (had to update parity).

 

AWESOME SOFTWARE unRAID! props for extremely easy software.

 

Since i went through so many hardware changes i think i will post about them in their appropriate threads and update the comparability sheet, so hopefully those of you who research things first will be able to not suffer for 1.5 days trying to get your server back up.

 

Thanks again for all of your help, unless anyone has any other info, i would say this board is "not compatible" without additional modification / hardware (specifically NIC), so i would not recommend it if your are purchasing a new one.

 

[CLOSED]