Something stupid aka Check basic hardware configuration before suspecting unRAID

[fitbrit]

Not quite off-topic.

 

I just got back from a long weekend away at a conference. I left my unRAID server on for my wife to listen to music or watch movies. Saturday she called me to say nothing was working. Past experience told me it was futile getting her to try and help me troubleshoot. I figured that the disks had spun down and she wasn't patient enough for them to come online fully (it's happened before). We both agreed that she should remain medialess until I got home.

 

When i got home, I found the server was off, and my desktop machine had rebooted, all pointing to a power outage while I was away. I turned on the server... start's up fine, except disk 3 is missing. No panic yet, as this happens once every 20 restarts or so, due to power issues or cables working loose. Reboot fixes it usually, so I reboot.

 

Nothing. Wait. Nothing. I went to my monitor and switched inputs to the server only to find it's stuck on the eVGA splash screen. I try to reboot again; the POST beeps fine, but it's continually stuck on the splash screen.

 

Damn, unRAID, what's wrong now? Well, if I understand stuff right, this is way before unRAID even kicks in, so even a busted flash drive shouldn't do this. Also, one missing disk shouldn't halt the boot-up process, should it? Perhaps the cabling is even looser than I thought? Temperatures have dropped a little in Montreal recently, even though it's sunnier, so perhaps some cable contraction has done something?

 

In the end I decide to open up the case and try again. Well, it looked like the big mobo power cord from the PSU was actually stopping the CPU fan from spinning up. A tiny adjustment, followed by checking all cables, RAM seating etc. resulted in booting up just fine.

 

Normally this would have been my first course of action, but the missing disk problem immediately before had thrown me into thinking it was something more sinister with unRAID. Bottom line, sometimes coincidences happen. Just use a process of elimination as usual and if something is fishy, think it through again!

[PhilH]

So True. Glad you got it figured out. Maybe that will help someone else.

 

Phil

[fitbrit]

Thanks Phil. I just felt like sharing.... and getting more life into these forums.