Hello,

This is probably not a new topic, not yet savvy enough to be able to search the forums well. My apologies for a probable repeat question.
Added a 2.5G NIC card to my server. OS sees card, all functions of OS seem "normal", however, none of the drives are populating. They were in proper order prior to the NIC addition.
Any suggestions on what I need to tweak to get the drives recognized again? And.. use the faster NIC interface?

Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.

29 minutes ago, BpForest said:

Any suggestions on what I need to tweak to get the drives recognized again? And.. use the faster NIC interface?

Without Diagnostics I could only make an educated guess: the slot you have put in the new nic is shadowed to a disk controller. You may only use one of them.

Read your Mobo's manual carefully. maybe it is enough to use a different slot.

I am seeing references to using a different slot too. As the the little Proliant is a pain to work on, want to dismantle as little as possible.
Will have to address this one way or another anyway.
Diag's attached

nastower-diagnostics-20260404-1506.zip

The slot shadowing on HP ProLiant servers is well documented — certain PCIe slots share lanes with the onboard SATA/SAS controller or storage backplane, so inserting a card in those slots disables the storage port. It's not a BIOS setting you can change, it's a hardware mux decision the board makes.

To identify which slot is the problem without guessing: look in the diagnostics ZIP for syslog or lspci output. You'll see the drives disappear from the device tree, and the storage controller may still show but with no attached devices. The HP iLO event log (if attached) would confirm a slot power event coinciding with the drive loss.

For the G7/G8/G9 generation ProLiants, the typical rule is:

- Slot 1 (closest to CPU): shares bandwidth with the embedded storage controller

- Slots 2-4: typically safe for add-in cards

But the exact mapping depends on your specific model. The HP Quickspecs or the server's User Guide has a PCIe slot dependency table — searching for your model number + "PCIe slot dependencies" on the HP BIOS site usually pulls it up directly.

Quickest fix: move the NIC to the next available slot and see if drives come back without needing to change any BIOS settings. If you have a 331i or similar embedded 4-port NIC already, you may be able to use those ports at 1G while you figure out placement, and then migrate the 2.5G NIC to a non-conflicting slot.

Once drives are back, confirm with lspci | grep -i ethernet in the unRAID terminal that both controllers show up, and check the network speed with ethtool eth1 (or whichever interface the new NIC gets).

Thanks for the time everyone. I opted for removing the NIC. The drives were immediately seen. Only two slots and both were brining problems with them.
Not being totally hardcore with this device, I simply need it to work. I would like more transfer speed for sure, but at the moment, being new to this, I need it to work. I am back to that basic function that is needed.
Your time is appreciated.

you MAY try to use an USB NIC.

But they maybe unstable, so you have been warned...