Likely HPA related problem after upgrade.

 

I don't have all the system information available right at this moment to add to this post.  I did have Host Protected Area difficulties when first setting up this UnRaid box and now I have upgraded from 4.5.3 to 4.7 and once again I see a size mismatch that prevents the array from starting without intervention.  Unfortunately, I own one of the dreaded Gigabyte boards that shovels HPA around by default on the attached drive(s).

 

I just did this last night and I wanted to get feedback from the community for experience before I proceed.  The first time I got this error I formatted the drives to remove the size mismatch issue.  That was a bandaid and not really a fix.  Now I have data on one of the two disk drives and that isn't an option.  I've read recently that Gigabyte has realized their stupidity in making HPA enabled by default and has BIOS upgrades for many of their models that disables this so called feature.

 

My question is then how do I properly recover from this without data loss?  Both my parity and disk1 are affected.  I do plan on doing the bios upgrade to remove the HPA default on behavior and look for the setting to disable it, but I'm curious if this will fix the problem on reboot or allow for a permanent fix that requires further action to correct.

 

If syslog or hardware specs are desired please request and I'll add at my next availability.

 

Here are some cropped screenshots of my UnRaid main and devices page.

Main

Devices

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10866.0

After looking at the process here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10866.0  I attempted to solve my problem with tools at hand, but due to encountered difficulty and time constraint I followed an alternative to remove HPA using the HDAT2 tool http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6806.msg66465#msg66465

 

I took a risk and trusted my parity after the procedure was completed.  My data was available and my parity rebuilt with 504 errors encountered.  All my disks are now using their full capacity.

 

I want to thank Gigabyte for embedding this wonderful timebomb and myself for ignoring it when it was first encountered.  I should know better!  Thanks to this forum for solutions made quickly available.