I recently bought a pair of SATA Drives, burned them in, and was installing them in my array tonight.

 

I had 15 disks in my array (13 SATA + 2 IDE) and was going to 16 disks (15 SATA + 1 IDE)

 

All went well.  The system posted and all of the drives were recognized. 

 

Problem is, it wouldn't boot off the USB stick. 

 

I got the message "Reboot and Select proper Boot device".

 

This is a P5B VM DO with 2 addon controllers - an Adaptec 1430SA (4 ports all used) and a Supermicro MV8 (8 ports - only 3 used).

 

I tried disconnecting one of the SATA drives and it booted fine.  I then plugged that one back in and disconnected another SATA drive on the other addon controller.  It booted fine.  The system seems pretty unhappy booting off the USB stick with 15 SATA drives installed - 14 is okay, but not 15.  I only have one more IDE drive in my system (cache disk) - unplugging that drive had no effect.

 

Any ideas of things to try?  I feel that if I could just get the system to boot off the USB disk, all would be well.  (I tried different USB ports, but no luck).

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

Go in the BIOS and reset the boot order... you'll find that your USB stick has been demoted by the added disks... will happen almost every time you add a disk.

Thanks for the quick reply.  I did check that.  The drive is actually configured as a "Forced FDD" in the USB settings which makes it recognized as a removable device (like a floppy) and not as a hard disk.  The removable disk is at the top of the boot order and is set to the USB stick.  The list of hard disks selectable for boot maxes out at 12.  The USB is always on the bottom, so once I went over 11 hard disks the USB option disappeared.  It was then though I discovered the "Forced FDD" option and switched to this removable media boot option.  It has worked well up until now.

 

My P5B Deluxe has worked with 16 sata drives and 3 addon controllers just by using Forced FDD. In the boot device menu the usb drive shows up for me.

 

 

Thanks Romir!

 

My screens look almost identical, although I have a Kingston rather than Corsair Flash.  But even though it is configured correctly, it just refuses to boot.

 

If I disconnect just one hard disk, and make no changes to the BIOS, it boots correctly.

 

I am curious which add-on controllers do you have?

 

I notice that there is a BIOS update for my motherboard - I have 1001 and there is a 1002 out.  The release notes don't give me any reason to think it will fix my problem, but I am going to try and install it anyway.

 

I also am going to try to get into the Adaptec controller BIOS settings (i.e., press Ctrl-A at the appropriate time).  Every time I try I get some sort of out-of-memory situation.  I am going to try and pull the other controller and see if that helps.  (I know I got into it at one time)

 

I am also going to see if there are firmware updates for either the Adaptec 1430SA or the Supermicro MV8.  Anyone have any experience updating firmware on either or these?

I also am going to try to get into the Adaptec controller BIOS settings (i.e., press Ctrl-A at the appropriate time).  Every time I try I get some sort of out-of-memory situation.  I am going to try and pull the other controller and see if that helps.  (I know I got into it at one time)

 

Long shots here, but worth asking.

 

What kind of video card are you using?

How much video memory and How much total system memory?

In character mode applications I choose a video card with the least amount of memory. In turn, this leaves any space that would have been used by video memory to be available to the system.

I also do not cache or shadow the video bios as this holds memory from the operating system (especially when it's not needed in character mode linux).

Also, if there are any options for reserving video space, I usually set that to a minimum.

 

Sometimes on controller cards or in the bios, there are options in a bios that says reserve bios space. enable or disabling that can sometimes help.

Thanks WeeboTech!

 

The video card is onboard.  I will look to see if there are some settings to reduce the memory footprint and turn off caching and any "reserving" of memory space.

 

The machine has 2G of RAM, but I am unsure of what memory is available to the bootup process.  It may be limited to 64K.

 

I am going to try playing with it again tonight.  Maybe one of these will be the solution.

 

Thanks again!

I went through BIOS shrinking the video size, and disabling caching and memory reserves.

 

Something I did allowed me to get into the configuration screen (Ctrl-A) on the 1430SA controller without resorting to removing other controller cards.  (I still got some type of memory warning, but it did eventually come up anyway.) 

 

The only setting (on the 1430SA) that seemed questionable was the BIOS setting.  I tried changing it from enabled to disabled, and saved the settings.

 

After a reboot, the system had no problem booting from the USB stick.  All drives are registering in unRAID.

 

I didn't need to update my BIOS or firmware.

 

Many thanks for the help.

 

Version info for anyone troubleshooting ...

- P5B VM DO - BIOS level 1001

- Adaptec 1430SA - BIOS version 5.0-0 B2227

- Supermicro MV8 Version 1.0b

 

WOW lucky guess on tight space in Upper memory blocks... and here I thought I was farting in a windstorm. 

For the record, I have seen when I shrink video memory size, that more becomes available to linux.

If I am only doing text, I shrink allocated/reserved memory as far as I can.