Unraid can’t boot !

[ohmaxx]

Hi guys !  

I’m moving some piece of my unraid server motherboard / cpu / ram as but after my switch i am facing an error at boot :

Loading /bzimage ok bad file number
Failed to allocate initramfs memory, bailing out 

Booting kernel failed : bad file number

 

Someone have an idea ? 

To add some informations : 

Build :
-Unraid 6.9.2 (16Gb sandisk usb)
-CM MSI Mag z690 ddr4 wifi 
-Proco Intel i7-12700k
-Ram Corsair Vengeance 2x32GB

 

What i have try : 

-Normaly boot just after migration (no boot only bios appear) 
- Change in Unraid usb the folder EFI- to EFI (boot but give the picture error) 
- Change uefi mode to legacy + uefi on motherboad but say the usb isnt in legacy so dont boot on it 
- Erase the USB with a new unraid (create tool + with efi parameter enable on the creator) -> same error on boot 
- Import the back up of unraid usb on a new one -> same error

I really don’t know what to do :( 

Help me please !

[rootd00d]

I have the exact same issue.

 

Unraid 6.10.3

Intel i9-12900k

MSI MEG z690 ACE

 

One thing I've noticed is that, after switching to CSM, trying to use IGD as the primary graphics device is no longer possible (chipset limitation) which requires that I find a way to get unRaid to boot in UEFI mode.

 

Even memtest86 won't run...

 

It doesn't seem to be a UEFI boot issue with the motherboard in general, as Windows was installed using a UEFI-enabled USB boot drive.

[itimpi]

5 hours ago, rootd00d said:

Even memtest86 won't run...

The version provided with Unraid will not work with UEFI boot.    If you want a version that will download it from memtest86.com

[mgadbois]

I'm looking at this board for UnRaid. Did you ever get this figured out?

[ohmaxx]

On 12/30/2022 at 8:30 PM, mgadbois said:

I'm looking at this board for UnRaid. Did you ever get this figured out?

Hey, yes i made it works and it's running perfectly now but i don't remember what i had to do to make it sorry

[rootd00d]

Did you disable “Above 4G Support”?

Do you also have a discrete GPU installed?

 

Im not able to do that because the system won’t post, I believe because there is a GPU present. Also, that would (I think…) disable Thunderbolt 4 support, which is the whole reason I bought this board.

[rootd00d]

Ok, I got it to boot. Had no trouble getting everything set up and a stable VM running with seemingly excellent performance.  The trick was to set a static setting for “Max TOLUD” in the BIOS. Any value appeared to work - just not “Dynamic”.

 

A major drawback however was that ALL of the USB controllers or this motherboard (MSI MEG z690 ACE) are in the same IOMMU group.  Crap!

 

So, despite only having only 2 additional PCIe slots on the board, I opted to pick up a USB controller and 10gbe NIC. 

https://vantecusa.com/products_detail.php?p_id=119

 

https://www.asus.com/networking-iot-servers/wired-networking/all-series/xg-c100c/
 

Since the USB controller has 4 dedicated chips for controlling each port, I’d be able to assign each port to the VM however necessary, but in my case I just assigned them all to the same VM.

 

That let me have my primary keyboard, wireless mouse, monitor USB hub, and USB audio interface all connected to the PCIe USB controller - and that’s when I was defeated.

 

Absolutely no amount of tweaking let me get the audio interface to work without the krispies. It’s a MOTU UltraLite-mk3.

 

https://motu.com/products/motuaudio/ultralite-mk3

 

This interface has terrible WDM drivers evidently, and only operates even on bare metal without clicks and pops when using the ASIO drivers, either in a DAW, or using Voicemeeter.  But, assuming that was the case it would work flawlessly.

After endless tweaking (message-signaled interrupts, CPU pinning/reservation) I could not get the card to operate without it clicking at least every few minutes. I could tell the tweaking was actually helping because it got to a point where LatencyMon wasn’t complaining at all, even when running 3D benchmarks.

 

It *seems* like it might have been tied to something pertaining to the storage, strangely enough.  The VM is running off a dedicated NVMe drive, and there’d just be moments where I knew there was some disk or network activity and the clicks would start to occur more often.

 

Can someone recommend a better USB controller that’s actually worked with an audio interface (DAC)?

 

This would clearly be unworkable when trying to use it as a recording workstation, and defeat the whole point of having the computer at all… so back to bare metal.

 

In summary - the MEG is not really setup for IOMMU very well, and USB audio issues killed my UNRAID NAS+game system dreams… so I installed it on the computer my new system replaced - an Intel Q9650 on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P with 8GB of DDR2 and it’s running absolutely fine. It has zero IOMMU groups however, and an ancient MSI Radeon HD6850 Twin Frozr that’s eating itself alive. Validated it could detect the 10TB WD Red Plus (3gbps SATA 2.0 lulz), and off to the races.

 

If it’s stable, I’ll probably pick up a few more drives, possibly an HBA, and another 10Gbe NIC. Meh.

 

Fscking IOMMU and USB.

 

The real pissoff was that it didn’t seem like I was going to be able to have a VM driven off a single Thunderbolt cable passed through the wall, but maybe I should try that after I buy a Thunderbolt 4 dock that doesn’t look like a piece of trash.  Perhaps I could even get the audio interface to work properly without the Vantec.

/rant