Hey all,

my servers been up and running for like 8 years with no real problems, probably only restarted once or twice last year, uptime has been great.

 

The other day we had a power cut and now i cant get it to boot into the UnRaid flash drive automatically. when it fails i can force it to start and everything is fine, but ive had to move the server away from the cupboard to do that and get a monitor connected.

 

Any tips on how to debug this? Ive tried to force it to the sandisc in bios, but the hba always takes over and tries to boot from the raid drives.

 

thanks

christiab

looks like your kingston drive fails and so forces boot to abort and you to press f1 to enter bios.

Pull out the bad drive and see, if you are able to automatically boot up unraid again (without the bios force)

Or turn off smart detection in bios to make it ignore the failing drive (maybe you can stil read it, but look at the error list and prepare to get a replacement drive soon)

 

Ahhh.
So the Kingston drive is just my stash drive or whatever it’s called. The SSD. It might hold my VM, which will be a pain, but I can sort that out.

I’ll remove it when I get back and see if that helps it. I have turned off the smart detection but that didn’t resolve the issue.

Thanks for the tips. I’ll report back. Time to get a UPS!

Christian


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Thanks Michael, I quickly disconnected the ssd before I ran out and it booted straight into unraid, so have ordered a new SSD.

Now here’s a question:
Seeing as unraid is on the usb flash drive, why didn’t this boot into unraid and then I would be able to see that it’s a busted drive? I’m thinking of getting a second SSd for redundancy, but this wouldn’t really help me as it would still stop unraid from booting to discover that I need to replace the disk. As it’s totally headless I don’t see the bios boot until I move the server into my office and hook it up to a monitor.


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Just now, niietzshe said:

Thanks Michael, I quickly disconnected the ssd before I ran out and it booted straight into unraid, so have ordered a new SSD.

Now here’s a question:
Seeing as unraid is on the usb flash drive, why didn’t this boot into unraid and then I would be able to see that it’s a busted drive? I’m thinking of getting a second SSd for redundancy, but this wouldn’t really help me as it would still stop unraid from booting to discover that I need to replace the disk. As it’s totally headless I don’t see the bios boot until I move the server into my office and hook it up to a monitor.


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The initial boot process is controlled by the BIOS so it is up to the BIOS to decide to boot off the Unraid USB and there is nothing that Unraid can do if the BIOS won’t select the Unraid flash drive as its boot device.

I guess, it is just a "feature" of your bios. It prevents booting if one drive fails. This has nothing to do with unraid.

I have never seen this in the wild, maybe you can turn it off.

 

Ohh yeah sure, I know this isn’t unraids fault, I’m just wondering if the bios or the HBA is getting in the way and how to avoid this on a hardware/firmware basis.


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it is definatly your bios

Most BIOS's do that.  Any SMART attribute on a drive attached to the motherboard that is failing will trigger it.  It can be disabled by the setting (Stop on all errors, ignore keyboard etc)  Wording will vary.  

 

But, you really don't want to change that.  Even though Unraid has SMART monitoring etc you may miss the notification, and any drive that is actually in FAILING NOW state should be replaced ASAP.

Thanks all. I mean I’ve had a good run of at least 8 years without a failure, so it’s a good thing I’ve never had to deal with this I guess.

I’ve tried the SSd in multiple ports just to make sure and it’s certainly knackered. I’ve bought a new SSd and will be shopping for a ups and little monitor to go in the cupboard.

Thanks for the advice
Christian


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With the new SSd installed everything booted up as normal. Thanks all.


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