February 17, 201214 yr So I spent all evening trying to diagnose this one... Was moving my Unraid server into the basement, and for some reason when I moved the system downstairs the parity drive would be missing when the machine boots up. So I move the system back upstairs to connect to a keyboard/monitor in order to remedy, and of course now the parity drive is back again! So I move the system downstairs, "CAREFULLY", and poof, no more parity drive. I move the system to another outlet downstairs.. still no parity. I move to another spot in the room in case of some crazy interference pattern from the electrical box... nope, still no parity. So, again, I bring the system back upstairs and of course the parity is back again on boot! So, stumped as I am I begin a round of reboots with various combinations of hardware until I find the solution. Turns out, my system requires my USB keyboard to be connected in order for the parity drive to be detected at all! The other three drives in the system worked fine no matter where I was, so this was only affecting the parity drive. Can someone offer any explanation of this?
February 17, 201214 yr No explanation... Questions... Does the BIOS report all of the drives when you boot up with the screen connected but keyboard absent? This sounds like a weird BIOS issue. So what is the motherboard / BIOS version? Have you any other SATA ports that you can use? It may be that the parity drive is on a different controller and it being treated differently by the BIOS. I doubt that unRAID is responsible, but what version are you running?
February 18, 201214 yr Author I did not check the BIOS without the keyboard, but with the keyboard there were no issues during POST or in the BIOS. If I move the system back upstairs for any reason in the near future I'll run a quick test to see if no keyboard makes a difference during POST. The system is an Asus A8N-E, BIOS v.1013 I believe. There are 4 SATA ports on the board, and they are all in use. I do not have a separate controller. During my troubleshooting I did try different combinations of ports, and it made no difference. The drive in question is a Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001. I have another Seagate ST3000DM001 being used in the array and it was detected no problems every time. In my mind, that rules out a hardware compatibility issue. Of the four drives, it was only ever the parity drive that would not be detected, regardless of the configuration... I know, very odd. I'm glad I found the source of the problem, but I can't rule out if the issue was hardware or software related, or a combination of both.
February 18, 201214 yr Thanks for the added info. I guess we'll never get to the bottom of the issue, since it looks like a relatively old board and that seems to be the most recent BIOS available. At least you know how to make it work, even it means leaving a keyboard connected. Interesting that it's a socket 939 board. I recently built my backup server using one of these - http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=939A790GMH - since I had a spare CPU and a bunch of RAM available. It's a modern board for S939 hardware. I use it with a 4 port Highpoint card and a cheap 2 port card to give me 11 SATA ports in total. It works well with unRAID 5B14, and no missing drives when the keyboard is absent.
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