I am running Unraid 5.0rc11 on an ASUS P5Q Delux Motherboard, with the lastest version of Simple Features installed

 

I was running with 10 disks, including parity, using 1 AOC-SASLP-MV8 card. 8 disks were off the card and 2 off the motherboard

 

Disks were running in 2 5 into 3 hot swap units

 

All was OK at this point

 

Today I added an extra AOC-SASLP-MV8 card and an extra 5 into 3 unit

 

I left the existing disks into their 5 into 3 units, and rewired so all disks are now served by the AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards. Unraid boots OK and everything is fine

 

I now want to add an additional disk, I add the disk using the main page and the disk is detected with a blue symbol. I tick the "I want to do this box" and Unraid informs me that the new disk will be cleared, and I click the Start button. However Unraid will not start and keeps jumping back to the main page allocation screen.

 

The extra 5 into 3 unit is empty except for the new disk. I have tried the new disk in all 5 locations, and Unraid will not start. I have tried bypassing the 5 into 3 unit and connecting the new disk directly to the card, but still it will not start.

 

Both AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards will detect the new disk, they are both running BIOS 3.1.0.21 and have 13h disabled. One of the cards is 2 years old so I know it is OK, and the latest card seems to behaving OK too.

 

The new disk which I am trying to add was previously used in a Windows 7 PC and so is NTFS formatted, but surely Unraid would just reformat it? It was used with a Gigabyte motherboard, and so may be HBA formated?

 

I have tried to get a syslog using Simple Features and have found it almost impossible. Even though the server has not been started, the system log is being continously written too, and it is almost imposible to select all text and then post into a text document.

 

I attached 3 segments of syslog which I have managed to save, complete with the screen capture. The disk which I am trying to add is disk 10

 

I am fairly confident that there is something wrong with the disk, and it is not hardware related, but would be very grateful for some assistance

Screen.zip

System_Log_1.zip

System_Log_2.zip

System_Log.zip

Somewhat similar happened with me when I was doing a parity swap disable, in the sense that although everything about the config was logically valid, the array would not start and would refresh back to the disk assignments page. I hope some solution for your issue reflects on what might have gone wrong in my case too.

Did you pre-clear the disk before trying to add it to the array? 

 

If you did not then the pre-clear will happen at the point you try and add the disk and while the pre-clear us running (which can take hours with a large disk) the array will not be usable. 

 

Running the pre-clear script against the disk before adding reduces the downtime to seconds, and also it carries out a full health-check of the disk as you do not want to add a disk that is not in prefect working order.

Thanks, I did not run preclear, I did expect to be offered the option as I understood that it was included in Simple Features, but can't see anywhere to select it

 

From looking through posts,  I am aware that it has been subsequently been removed at Joe L's request

 

I have run a disk health check and a short SMART test through SF, and no faults are found

 

I am not quite sure how to run the preclear script from outside Unraid, it appears that I have find out sb letter has been allocated to the new disc. If so and I can get it to work, I assume that I can run Unraid whilst it is preclearing?

 

The first thing I am going to try now is to remove HPA from the drive to see if it makes any difference

...I am not quite sure how to run the preclear script from outside Unraid...

Preclearing With Screen

If you don't want to install unMenu just to get Screen going there is also a Screen Plugin.

I have tried to remove HPA using HDAT2, but the copy with I used will not detect ATA devices http://www.hdat2.com/

 

I am using the lite version which the website says will work on SATA CD drives?

 

I have now worked out how to use preclear, and am clearing the drive now. It says that the partition does not start at the cylinder boundary?

Wiki on HPA

All is well now !!!

 

The preclear completed without any errors, and after a very quick format, the new disk is up and running. I guess to previous HPA hidden partition was stopping Unraid from starting

 

I have never used preclear before, and I have been using Unraid since V3, but I think I will use it for all new disks which I add to the array from now onwards now that I have got the hang of it. I can certainly see the point of making sure that disks are OK before using them for data storage

 

I know that it was removed from Simple Features as Joe L's request, but it would be very useful to have it as either a V5 plugin or back in SF (of course with Joe L's permission) rather than run as a seperate process.