Hey guys! Over the past week I finished building my new unraid server (hardware below) to replace my former Vista based media server. The hardware went together without a problem, and using a preconfigured flash drive I was able to boot into unraid and access the system management utility via telnet from my workstation. I ran preclear on four drives: two brand new Seagate 3TB drives (thanks Black Friday) and two empty Samsung F4 2TB drives out of my old server. As far as I can tell, preclear finished without error in about a day and a half. Via the devices tab, I assigned one of the Seagate 3TB drives as the parity drive and then I assigned the two Samsung 2TB drives and the remaining Seagate 3TB drive as disk 1-3. Interestingly, I don't have sda listed under any of my drives. I only have sdb/sdc/sdd/sde for my four drives. Where's sda? Anyway, here's my issue. When I started the array and formatted the disks (which was quick due to preclear) I ended up with a red dot in front of parity and the message "Not installed." Disk 1 and 2 are blinking green dots and are associated with the two Samsung drives. Disk 3, which should be the other Seagate 3TB drive isn't showing up. I have an orange dot in front of "started." I can't run a parity check because it doesn't think I have a parity drive installed. So I hesitate to do anything else until I solve this issue. FWIW, all four drives reside in the top row of bays  my norco case and are all attached to the same reverse breakout cable going directly to the MB SATA ports 0-3. I don't have anything connected to my MV8s, though they are both installed on the MB.

 

Case - Norco 4220 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219033

MB - Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182253

CPU - Intel Core i3 3220 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116775

RAM - Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139262

PSU - SeaSonic X-750 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151087

(two) Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009

HDDS - currently two Seagate 3TB and Samsung F4 2TB

 

I'm running version 4.7 on a preconfigured flash drive direct from Lime Tech. I attempted to attach a system log but my notebook file (copy and paste from //tower/log/syslog) is larger than the largest allowable attachment. How can I fix that?

 

Anyway, thanks for any help!

To be clear, when I run ls -1 /dev/sd[a-z] I get:

 

/dev/sda

/dev/sdb

/dev/sdc

/dev/sdd

/dev/sde

 

even though I only have four drives in my system. So I DO have sda, I just don't know what it is and it's not associated with any of the HDDs I can choose from in the devices tab. Reading through the wiki, it seems like I should only have a-d if I have four drives installed. What am I missing?

you need to run version 5beta8 or higher for 3tb drives

sda is the flash. The sd letter assignments are ephemeral.

Well, I guess I knew that, but I had it in my head that the 3TB drives could be used with 4.7 but they just wouldn't recognize the full size. Anyway, I'm guessing that's the issue.

 

So I went here: http://lime-technology.com/download/cat_view/49-unraid-server and downloaded 5.0-rc8a. I powered down the unraid server, put the flash drive into my workstation, backed up my flash drive, and then copied over the new bzimage and bzroot files. After installing the flash drive back into the unraid server, it booted into unraid without any apparent issue. ifconfig confirmed that I have my previously assigned IP address, but my server (still named "tower") isn't showing up in my network on my workstation. I also cannot access http://tower or http://ipaddress like I used to. So, I replaced my bzimage and bzroot files with the original ones from the backup, rebooted, and everything went back to the way it was (available on network and able to access http://tower). So I redownloaded the zip, tried again, same result. So I'm stuck again. Either I have to proceed with 2TB disks or I need some help upgrading to a version that supports 3TB disks.

 

On a side note, thanks for the info about sda. That makes sense, but I was confused by this old writeup http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2011/05/19/guide-unraid-server-part-2-installing-unraid/ that suggests that I should see sda/sdb/sdc when three drives are installed. But here's something strange. When I reverted back to 4.7, after the first time I failed to telnet to the 5.0 version, I went to the devices tab to see my disks and my four disks had been reassigned to sda/sdb/sdc/sdd when before they were sdb/sdc/sdd/sde. Now, after the second failed attempt, I have reverted once again to 4.7. In the devices tab, my four HDDs are listed as sda/sdb/sdc/sdd. What happened to sde? Is that the flash drive? Why wasn't it like that before?

 

Finally, thank you guys. I honestly have no idea what I'm talking about, and I have even less of an idea what I'm doing. This community is the single reason I was willing to make the switch to an unraid server, because I knew I would get help through the process. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, at some point, I'll learn enough that I can help someone else get started.

Well, I still can't explain why my four drives used to be listed as sdb/sdc/sdd/sde in the device tab in 4.7, but they're now listed as sda/sdb/sdc/sdd in both 4.7 and 5.0-rc8a. Maybe it's not important.

 

But, I think I solved my second issue with no network connectivity after upgrading to rc8a. As is typical, my searching skills surpass my troubleshooting skills. I found a single post referencing the need to use LAN2 on my MBD-X9SCM-F-O with 5.0-rc8a rather than LAN1, which I had previously been using with 4.7. So after upgrading for a third time, I switched over to LAN2 and sure enough...back online. I poked around 5.0 to find my previous settings intact. Then I added one Seagate 3TB to the parity spot and the second Seagate 3TB to the disk 3 spot, restarted the array, formatted disk 3, stopped the array, restarted and started parity sync. Says I have 503 minutes to go. So, guess I'll go to bed and update this tomorrow.

Okay, as an update, the issue appears to be the fact that I was using 4.7 and 3TB drives. My mistake. I knew 4.7 didn't support 3TB drives, but I thought it simply truncated them to 2TB and that a future upgrade would solve that. Anyway, I am now running 5.0-rc8a and LAN2 and everything seems to be functioning fine. After a full day of parity setup and check, it appears I'm good to go. Now to start moving data!