Hard Drive Swap : Computer Will not post


mmomega

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Very odd issue I just ran in to this past weekend.

 

No dead drives but I purchased a new larger drive to replace one of the older originals that are still in the system.

My Originals were 5 - 4TB HGST drives, 4-5 years ago or so, doing great just getting full'er. 

I have added a 12TB IronWolf as a Parity drive, then a 10 TB IronWolf and an 8TB IronWolf over the last year.

 

I went to pull the most crowded 4TB drive out, swap in a 10TB to let the system rebuild but it would never even fully post.

I have fast booting off all of the non-essential, and just the Board logo comes up and hangs, indefinitely. Never even getting to the UnRaid loader screen.

If I put the 4TB back in, the computer POSTS.

Try swapping a different 4TB drive with the new 10TB, same, computer won't POST. Put back the older drive and.... yep... everything boots right up.

 

I initially thought, maybe the PSU.... it had 2 cables with 4 SATA power connectors.... so 2 cables, 8 SATA drives.

I wanted a modular PSU so I ended up ordering a 100W higher PSU fully modular and the SATA cables have 3 connectors power cable.

 

NOPE.

 

Same issue. Pull any of the older 4TB drives and replace with a 10, and no POST'ing. 

 

I am at a bit of a wall until I can figure this out. Nothing has changed for quite some time. BIOS updated. Etc. Just a "simple" drive swap is turning in to quite the head scratcher.

 

Help please oh great and powerful friends... I am typically fairly capable of quite the tough troubleshooting but this has be stumped.

 

System is:

ASRock x570m Pro4

3900X

64GB Corsair 3200 non-rgb RAM

2 - 1TB nVME cache

1 - Sammy USB 32gb Boot

8- varying sized SATA drives

1- Dual 10Gb PCIe card , I can get more detailed information if needed

 

All of this has been this exact setup for well over a year. Well it had 7 SATA drives, then I added an 8th ( a 10TB) which filled all of my on-board connectors maybe 8 months ago. Which is now why I am swapping drives versus adding more.

 

It is a microcase so 8 SATA's is my physical limit for this case.

 

I appreciate the help / wisdom / insight y'all might bring, and I am definitely buying someone a beer, or some kind of pat on the back gift for helping out with this.

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1 hour ago, Frank1940 said:

Sometimes replacing a drive results in the BIOS re-configuring itself to boot from the new drive.

 

Another (remote) possibility is that that 10TB has failed and the failure prevents the MB from posting.

Yeah I need to re-check that, fairly confident that I had all options removed except for the USB boot drive.

Possible it is a failed drive, it is brand new just out of the package, I'll look into BIOS settings then try to get that drive in to another computer this week to check it out.

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2 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

Not what I asked, but I see why you thought that. Many (most?) motherboards with more than 4 or 6 ports use additional chips onboard to drive the extra ports. They may or may not be a different color, or be silkscreen labeled with a different number scheme.

Not 100% atm. I can look deeper in to this hopefully later. All ports are black, labeled consecutively, 6 are bunched together and 2 seperate so quite possible there are seperate controllers.

I never had to know that much, in-depth, about the board previously but I am sure I will get to know it a bit better sometime this or next week.

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