November 9, 201213 yr Have a little problem here fellas. So I put together this server finally and flashed my m1015 (although no drives connected to it at the moment). I'm using 3 5-in-3 Norco SS-500 cages. So I loaded up unraid and I see that my Hitachi 2tb drive is not being recognized by unraid so I can't preclear it. It happened to be on SATA 0 (The first drive). So I thought maybe a cable is unplugged, no that wasn't it. I currently have 5 drives connected. I took 2 drives and put the hitachi in the 2nd slot. And BAM all of a sudden it appeared and was recognized. So I put the hitachi back into the 1st slot, put all the drives back in, and now all of the drives are recognized and everything is fine. -------------------- So I go in to do the preclear, but first decided to check the drives in the console. And I noticed that all the drives are recognized EXCEPT they start with sdB as the first drive being the Hitachi... I then used the ls -l command, and in fact all drives are there however, it seems that sdA is being taken up by my USB Flash drive that has unRAID loaded on it... I have another unraid server using an HP N36l and the usb doesn't take up a letter. So what do I do guys? How do I fix this? And what is the significance of this? ***I remember reading something about HBA and Gigabyte motherboards that it uses the first disk for HBA(I have no idea what that is or even means) but they recommended the first drive not to be the parity because it is used by the mobo for extra storage or something. So is my USB now being used for this? I'm not really sure what all this means, can you guys help me out please? Mobo: GA-MA74GM-S2 Still not sure if this is an HPA issue, or what. What do you guys think is happening?
November 9, 201213 yr Have a little problem here fellas. So I put together this server finally and flashed my m1015 (although no drives connected to it at the moment). I'm using 3 5-in-3 Norco SS-500 cages. So I loaded up unraid and I see that my Hitachi 2tb drive is not being recognized by unraid so I can't preclear it. It happened to be on SATA 0 (The first drive). So I thought maybe a cable is unplugged, no that wasn't it. I currently have 5 drives connected. I took 2 drives and put the hitachi in the 2nd slot. And BAM all of a sudden it appeared and was recognized. So I put the hitachi back into the 1st slot, put all the drives back in, and now all of the drives are recognized and everything is fine. -------------------- So I go in to do the preclear, but first decided to check the drives in the console. And I noticed that all the drives are recognized EXCEPT they start with sdB as the first drive being the Hitachi... I then used the ls -l command, and in fact all drives are there however, it seems that sdA is being taken up by my USB Flash drive that has unRAID loaded on it... I have another unraid server using an HP N36l and the usb doesn't take up a letter. You are mistaken. The USB drive always uses a letter. So what do I do guys? How do I fix this? And what is the significance of this? ***I remember reading something about HBA and Gigabyte motherboards that it uses the first disk for HBA(I have no idea what that is or even means) but they recommended the first drive not to be the parity because it is used by the mobo for extra storage or something. So is my USB now being used for this? I'm not really sure what all this means, can you guys help me out please? Mobo: GA-MA74GM-S2 Still not sure if this is an HPA issue, or what. What do you guys think is happening? This is not an HPA issue. There is nothing wrong. The Mobo is not suitable unRAID if it writes HPA. Check for a BIOS update. HPA creation must be off by default in BIOS. The option to turn it off is not sufficient. HPA will be written to the disks when the CMOS battery dies if HPA is not off by default and this puts the entire array at risk.
November 9, 201213 yr Author I thought it has to be the last letter not the first? I'm just now learning about this HPA business. How would I know if my board is doing it? I don't see any options for HPA in the BIOS. The manual is unclear about this.
November 9, 201213 yr Author I was wondering if the HPA could be being written to the flash drive. As I set that up as first boot...
November 9, 201213 yr I was wondering if the HPA could be being written to the flash drive. As I set that up as first boot... If it was written to the flash drive it would do no immediate harm. (other than occupy the last few megabytes of the flash drive) The harm will come when the flash drive dies, and the BIOS finds no disk with an HPA, so it adds one to the first hard disk it does find, clobbering your data. I've never heard of an HPA being added to a flash drive, so odds are it will not occur. (the BIOS knows better) The drive letters in Linux are assigned as the disks initialize. The specific assignments can change from one boot to the next as one disk might spin up faster than another, especially if you have multiple of the same make. The flash drive always has a device affiliated. It can be anything, usually it is /dev/sda or /dev/sdb, but if slow to be scanned, it can be anything at all. It is why it has a volume label of "UNRAID" ... so it can be identified and mounted at /boot. The BIOS will label the feature as BIOS Image, or something like that. It will not mention it is using an Host-Protected-Area (HPA) for the copy. Joe L.
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