March 25, 200818 yr Morning everyone, and hello from not so sunny Manchester UK. Its my first post so sorry if its a bit dumb!! Anyway I am a long time IT person but have NO linux backgorund so I am a bit stumped by what may be a very simple issue. In short I have dowloaded version 4.2.4 to test, prior to purchsing a full version to replace my Wiindows Home Server. I have managed to get the above MB to boot, but whan I log in as root and do an ifconfig it returns no info at all just drops down to another prompt. I also cannot get acess to the management interface //tower, which suggest that the Marvell 88E1116 onboard NIC is not being found ( I am now aware that its not on the supported list ). Before I pop out and buy a supported NIC (Netgear GA311GE 1000bt Gigabit PCI) I wanted to sanity check that this boards SATA controller ( nforce 570-SLI) will in fact work. ( again I am aware that it is not explicitly on the supoorted/tested list) the Mb has 6 sata ports so it would give me plenty of future proofing hence i am willing to tweak things if it is possible. Other alternative are replacing the MB with a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H and transfering everything over to it ( which is a bit more of a pain) but as the cost is not too great I am happy with either option. My kit list comprises of the following 3 x 500GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ 3.00GHz 2 x 1gb 800 mhz memory ZM600-HP Heatpipe Cooled 600W Modular PSU Just in case its relevant. Thanks in advance regards ChrisP
March 25, 200818 yr What do you see when you log in as root and then type: ls -lR /boot What do you see when you type: ls -l /dev/disk/by-label For the first command, you should see a listing of the files on your flash drive. root@Tower:/# ls -lR /boot /boot: total 95552 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1399064 Mar 18 13:39 bzimage* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 28864426 Mar 18 13:39 bzroot* drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 16384 Mar 20 23:01 config/ -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 9776 Dec 15 2006 ldlinux.sys* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 99256 Jan 3 2007 memtest* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 33404 Sep 5 2007 menu.c32* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2954 Mar 22 2007 readme.txt -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 244835 Mar 5 00:36 syslog_err.txt* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 392850 Mar 5 02:39 syslog_err2.txt* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 55075 Mar 5 02:40 syslog_err2.zip* /boot/config: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 393 Mar 6 04:04 disk.cfg* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 345 Oct 7 00:15 go* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 589 Nov 5 15:43 group* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 132 Sep 11 2007 ident.cfg* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63 Oct 4 2005 model.cfg* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 108 Jan 16 2007 network.cfg* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 939 Nov 5 15:43 passwd* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80 Sep 12 2007 share.cfg* drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Sep 28 07:42 shares/ -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 521 Nov 5 15:43 smbpasswd* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Mar 21 05:12 super.dat* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3519 Mar 23 2007 timezone* /boot/config/shares: total 48 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 177 Sep 12 2007 Movies.cfg* For the second, you should see the label "UNRAID" used to identify the flash drive so it can be mounted at /boot, so the OS can get to the config files. Something like this: root@Tower:/# ls -l /dev/disk/by-label total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mar 18 16:14 UNRAID -> ../../sda1
March 25, 200818 yr Author Hi Joe thanks for your reply, Well I get the following when I type your suggested commands ls -l /boot total 0 Thats it nothing else when I tried ls -l /dev/disk/by-label i get the following lrwxrwxx 1 root root 10 mar 25 -5:13 media_store -> ../../sbd1 which is strange as MEDIA_Store is the disk label for the existing NTFS partition for that drives previous HTPC life!! I had a look at the syslog and it seem to be picking up the disks as it identifies them by product and model number. anyway, thats pure guesswork on my part so any help is greatfully recieved. I am just glad that I have a few days off work to try and become a little more linux savvy. Regards ChrisP
March 25, 200818 yr I can confirm that a board based on the nForce 570SLI chipsets *should* work, as I have an "EPOX MF570 SLI AM2 NVIDIA nForce570 ATX Motherboard". It is very fast and has 8 SATA II ports. I have an "AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+(65W) 2.4GHz dual core" on it. I really like the Epox nForce 570 and 590 boards, BUT they are hard to recommend because the company has practically gone out of business. The boards themselves are great, and if anyone is interested, you can still purchase them at the Epox clearance store at: https://www.epoxstore.com/Default.asp. I do NOT recommend the nForce 4 boards there. The Epox nForce 570SLI sells for $65.
March 25, 200818 yr When you prepared the flash drive, did you give it a volume label of: UNRAID It MUST be UNRAID, 6 characters and all capitals. Edit: WOW! I beat Joe! But his post is much more explanatory and helpful.
March 25, 200818 yr Hi Joe thanks for your reply, Well I get the following when I type your suggested commands ls -l /boot total 0 Thats it nothing else when I tried ls -l /dev/disk/by-label i get the following lrwxrwxx 1 root root 10 mar 25 -5:13 media_store -> ../../sbd1 which is strange as MEDIA_Store is the disk label for the existing NTFS partition for that drives previous HTPC life!! I had a look at the syslog and it seem to be picking up the disks as it identifies them by product and model number. anyway, thats pure guesswork on my part so any help is greatfully recieved. I am just glad that I have a few days off work to try and become a little more linux savvy. Regards ChrisP Apparently, you did not set the volume label on the USB flash drive. It should be set to UNRAID Since it could not be located in the "by-id" folder, it could not be mounted at /boot. Therefore, your /boot folder is empty. Since the flash drive was not mounted at /boot , that folder does not contain the scripts that would start unRaid. So... unplug the flash drive, put it in a windows box, right-click and in the properties set its volume label to UNRAID and try again. It does not matter that your older disk has a volume label. It will eventually be re-formatted with a reiserfs file-system, but you did not get that far. Joe L.
March 25, 200818 yr Author Good News After a bit of USB drive fun and games, it has now booted up and is running as I would have expected. So thanks for you advice, it appears that my XP home pc does not like the USB flash drives I have, however my laptop formats them a treat!! So I now have a usb key working and a unraid server that boots and can be accessed remotely from the web interface. All I have to do now is set up the disks and transfer huge amonts of files!! A quick question before I proceed, I plan to add the data drives first copy ver the file then add the parity and let it build overnight, if thst a mistake then please let me know. Also a quick performance question regarding drives, I had planned to get a third samsung 500gb 16mb cache sata drive for parity, but instead got a good deal on a seagate/maxtor 500gb that has 32mb cache. So as that in theory should have a little better performance I planned to use that as the parity drive. Does this make sense or should I use the fastest drives forserving files and maybe put my HD video content on it? Thoughts most welcome Thanks again ChrisP
March 25, 200818 yr Your plans to leave the parity drive initially unassigned, to load your data disks, and then assign a parity drive and let parity generate overnight will work fine. as far as which drive to use for parity... probably does not matter, other than it must be equal or larger than any other. (all it would take to force a specific brand/mode drive to be used would be for it to have 1 more block of storage than the other brand, then it must be the parity drive) To write to the unraid server, both the parity disk block AND the data drive disk block must BOTH be first read, to get current contents to calculate parity, and then written to save the data and new parity calculation. The overall write speed will be dependent upon the slower drive, not the faster. When reading, only the data drive is active. (here is where a high speed drive could possibly improve performance over a slower disk) When initially calculating parity, the same block on every data drive must be read before calculating parity to write the corresponding parity block on the parity drive. Again, the slowest drive (and buss bandwidth) determine the overall speed. I would probably use the faster drive as the data drive... especially if you mostly serve media and less frequently store new media, but if you are constantly writing (recording new shows, etc) then you might have different needs, you will not want any really "slow" drive. This is all relative. My old IDE based array is about 1/2 of the speed of a newer SATA based array, but easily keeps up with serving multiple DVD ISO images to media players on my lan, even when degraded with a failed disk. If you can still watch a movie when you want to, then even slower disks are fast enough. I'll bet your slower disks are fast enough for the HD media. Joe L.
March 25, 200818 yr Author Thanks for you assistance Joe, I am sure it wont be the last time I am calling here for help. Just backing up the hard drives before they get re formatted, and then its restore and parity tomorrow. Must remember to install the new GB switch before I start to transfer all that data or it could take a while!!!!! unraid is certainly not as point and click as windows home server( but then again it is also not as prescriptive) but as a media server it does seem to have all the bases covered. ( well until I arrive in the future enhancements thread asking for new stuff!!). I will leave it a few days before I amend the supported hardware info with this MB just to be sure there are no hidden daemons waiting for me!!! cheers Chris
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