Hi all.  I'm running an unRAID 4.2.1 system on an Asus P4P800S motherboard and I have been having some mysterious lockup trouble.  Essentially, occasionally, the system will just completely hang.  At this point in time, it will only respond to either holding its front panel power button for 10 seconds or so, or to hitting the power switch on the power supply.  The console is unresponsive as is the network.

 

The system has 9 disks in it (6 SATA and 3 PATA) and I am worried that the power supply might not be large enough (its 430W).  Does anyone know if this could be the trouble?

 

Another interesing problem is that the motherboard does not seem to be saving the bios settings anymore.  Everytime I reset the system, I have to reconfigure it to boot off of the flash disk once again.  It will remember these settings long enough to get into unRAID, but they will be reset if I CRTL-ALT-DEL or hit the front panel reset at any point in time before boot, or if I let the system boot and then shutdown cleanly.

 

I've only had this system for about 2 weeks now and it was stable until just recently.  I really don't want to have to tear it apart and find a different storage solution, since this one seems ideal, but I really need to have a handle on the stability issues before proceeding too much farther.  Losing all my data on this system would be a real disaster (the main reason why I moved to it in the first place).

A 430W P/S for 9 drives might be ok - depends on the design & quality of the supply - what model is it?

 

The motherboard not remembering bios settings may be due to a weak battery on the motherboard.

Its an el-cheapo model from JustPC; JPC-450DF.  According to the packaging, its max output is 450 but it is rated to only 430.  It has one 12v rail rated at 20amps.

 

I found this thread floating around out there

http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/612939-new-asus-a8s-x-motherboard-2.html

where a guy was having trouble with his Asus mobo (a different one, but also experiencing lockups and hangs) and one of the suggestions that he received was to check to make sure he didn't have this PS.  The person giving the advice told him it was a poor PS and could cause problems.  Another poster on the thread councled against running the onboard PATA and SATA on Asus mobos at the same time, claiming that it could cause problems as well.  I do currently have both enabled, but I don't have any drives plugged into the mobo's SATA ports (every SATA drive is plugged into the 8 port Supermicro controller I found referenced on these forums)

Also, what CPU are you using.

That has to be factored into how many watts the machine will require to be stable.

 

When it locks up, what activity occurs just before lockup?

 

How many PATA drives are active and are there cables where there is an endpoint that is not connected?

 

I've seen issues in the past where a drive is connected to one part of the cable and the endpoint not being connected hangs the bus or causes other difficulty.

 

However, I might guess there is an issue with the power supply.

I noticed the specs say 68% efficiency... That alone would make me decide on a new power supply.

Have you seen the thread on power supply calculators?

 

 

Also, what CPU are you using.

That has to be factored into how many watts the machine will require to be stable.

 

When it locks up, what activity occurs just before lockup?

 

How many PATA drives are active and are there cables where there is an endpoint that is not connected?

 

I've seen issues in the past where a drive is connected to one part of the cable and the endpoint not being connected hangs the bus or causes other difficulty.

 

However, I might guess there is an issue with the power supply.

I noticed the specs say 68% efficiency... That alone would make me decide on a new power supply.

Have you seen the thread on power supply calculators?

 

 

 

CPU is a 2.4 GHz Intel Prescott.

Usually I don't know what it was doing when it locked up; but the time I find out the system is unresponsive and I cannot get any data.

There are 3 PATA Drives in the system.  All are using cable select; two are connected as master and slave on the primary channel and one is connected as master on the secondary channel, leaving the slave connector on the secondary channel unconnected (the connector in the middle of the cable).

 

I went out and got a new battery for the motherboard and a new Corsair TX650 power supply.  http://www.corsair.com/products/tx.aspx.  While it only has a single 12v rail as well, this PS offers 52 amps on its 12v rail instead of just 20.

 

The battery has not helped the BIOS issue.  I have been playing around with it and noticed that I am not losing all of my setting, just those having to do with boot priority for the HDDs.  I suspect it might be some wierd interaction between the 8 port SATA controller card and the mobo BIOS.  I'm ignoring it for now since it seems to mostly be a hassle but not an actual threat to my data.

 

The new PS seems to be functioning well.  My largest data disk had a corrupt filesystem, presumably something to do with the previous violent lockups.  The same disk had failed a write last time there was a bad lockup.  The disk is absolutely brand new, and I really don't think it is having fundamental problems, but it will be next on my list of suspects should the lockups continue.  In the meantime, I rebuilt the disk from parity information and managed not to lose anything.

 

I'll keep watching it and let you all know if it seems to fix the trouble.

Good power supply choice!

 

As for bios - many older motherboards have this problem where they forget that the USB device is the boot device when you change the hard disk configuration (and sometimes when you just reboot).  Unfortunately it's a problem you will just have to live with, though you might check if Asus produced a bios update for this problem on that card (doubtful).

Try the 4.3 beta.

 

I used ot live in mysterious lockup land as well before the 4.3 beta was installed. Since then not a single one.

Well, its been over a week since the new PS, and I've been up and running since then without any lockup 

 

I have a slightly different problem (less critical), but I'm going to start a different thread for that.

As for bios - many older motherboards have this problem where they forget that the USB device is the boot device when you change the hard disk configuration (and sometimes when you just reboot).  Unfortunately it's a problem you will just have to live with, though you might check if Asus produced a bios update for this problem on that card (doubtful).

 

One final update.  A bios update did in fact fix this problem, although it is not called out in any of the release notes.  I was running 1003 on an Asus p4p800s and I upgraded to the 1007.005 beta (which has been in beta for 3 years now  ) and the bios now remembers to boot from the flash stick.  There is a 1006 non-beta release as well; but I don't seem to be having any problems so I am going to let things be for now.