November 14, 200817 yr I purchased a new system from Lime Tech that arrived today. It was built by Tom and included unRAID pro flash drive. It is for IDE drives only and includes 12 IcyDock IDE bays (I understand it to be the original system - MD1200/IDE). I placed a new 500 GB drive in the parity slot and a 400 GB drive in drive 1. When I open the unRAID web interface, only the parity drive is recognized as present, but the model number and serial number are wrong. I get green lights on both IcyDock bays. I have tried a couple of different drives in the bays, but can't get it to work. Any help would be greatly appreciated - I am new at this and totally lost. I will attach my syslog.txt as suggested by the troubleshooting wiki. Franklin
November 14, 200817 yr I purchased a new system from Lime Tech that arrived today. It was built by Tom and included unRAID pro flash drive. It is for IDE drives only and includes 12 IcyDock IDE bays (I understand it to be the original system - MD1200/IDE). I placed a new 500 GB drive in the parity slot and a 400 GB drive in drive 1. When I open the unRAID web interface, only the parity drive is recognized as present, but the model number and serial number are wrong. I get green lights on both IcyDock bays. I have tried a couple of different drives in the bays, but can't get it to work. Any help would be greatly appreciated - I am new at this and totally lost. I will attach my syslog.txt as suggested by the troubleshooting wiki. Franklin The green lights on the trays indicate they have power... the lights are pretty much useless otherwise for diagnosing what is going on. Since the unit was just shipped, I'd open it up (after unplugging it) and make sure all the boards are seated in their sockets on the motherboard. That would be the most likely problem (one or more were dislodged in shipping). If disk model/serial are "wrong" on the management display it usually indicates they are being detected in a different hardware slot than originally configured. (Different disk controller and/or cable) If a disk controller card was not seated, the remaining might end up at different addresses on the PCI bus than originally and cause exactly that problem. Other than that, if you move disks around, and use new slots in the arrray than before, you will need to use the "Restore" button to force a new disk configuration to be recognized. The button labeled "Restore" does not restore data, but instead stores a new disk configuration based on the currently assigned and working disks. It then proceeds to completely re-calculate parity based on those disks. Any old parity is immediately thrown away when you press the button labeled "restore"
November 14, 200817 yr Author Joe L. I have lurked in these forums for quite awhile, and one of the main reason I have purchased two of these systems recently is the great support from experts like yourself. I appreciate your prompt reply. Didn't find anything obviously loose, but I think I did discover the problem while looking the system over. It turns out the jumper settings were different on the various disks. After setting them all to cable select, unRAID identified them correctly. I guess Tom can only "idiot proof" his systems so much. Thanks again for your help! Franklin
November 14, 200817 yr I suspect that what happened is that this flash drive, perhaps in testing, had been used with a system with 12 IDE drives installed, and the person who prepped it for shipping forgot to reset the disk.cfg. That may be why the model and serial were wrong. Joe's advice was perfect. The jumpers really confused it, even causing an 80-wire cable error (!) and DMA errors, and found only one drive, with degraded performance, identified as about 360GB. It might be a good idea to post another syslog, so we can make sure that those errors were entirely because of the jumpers. If not, the system may appear to work OK, but performance may be bad.
November 15, 200817 yr Author The unit looks like it is working ok now that all disk jumpers are set to "cable select", though I have noticed that disk numbers don't seem to match the location where I have put them (ie: I have a disk in position 8 per Tom's handout, but it shows up as position 10 on the web interface, with no disk listed in positions 8 or 9). Haven't done anything to check performance yet. Here it the new system log, as you suggested. Any input would be most welcome. Franklin
November 15, 200817 yr Author RobJ, Sorry, I am new to this. I thought I followed the troubleshooting instructions properly. I established a telnet connection and typed the following: cp /var/log/syslog /boot/syslog.txt chmod a-x /boot/syslog.txt I then powered off and attached the unRAID flash to my computer and attached the syslog.txt file. Did I need to delete the existing syslog.txt file first? When I restarted the unRAID system it started a parity check, which looks like it will take a few hours to complete. Is this normal behavior? Can I create a new syslog.txt while this is happening? Thanks again for all the help! Franklin
November 15, 200817 yr Author RobJ, When I looked more closely at the files on the unRAID flash, I noticed a syslot.txt - it looks like it was created at the time I attempted to create a new syslog.txt flie. Perhaps I typed wrong? At any extent, here is that file.
November 15, 200817 yr That 'syslot' was the correct one. The errors are gone, system looks fine! It appears to be PCI-bound as the sync speed was a little slow (around 18MB/sec), even for an 8 drive all IDE system. The speed of the drives was fine, all 8 were set to UDMA/100. Adding an inexpensive SiI3132 card and a SATA II drive connected to it, and moving parity to the SATA drive would make a real difference. However, in normal operation, you should see good performance, since most access is not simultaneous. See the Improving unRAID Performance page for some tips. A curiosity, prior to formatting them, all but one of your drives had exactly 4 partitions, which is rather unusual. (The other one, hdm, was empty.) Was that a convention from work perhaps? I'm not familiar with Tom's handout, but what I can say is, the drives are assigned exactly as you want them on the Devices tab. If you would like to change the disk numbers, you can, with care, by re-assigning them on that tab, and then following this procedure: Make unRAID Trust the Parity Drive, Avoid Rebuilding Parity Unnecessarily. Because you just did a Parity Check, you can abort this one, but let it finish a few percent at least. Be very careful to follow the instructions exactly. Most importantly, don't re-assign the parity drive. If you have configured User Shares, make sure you also adjust the Includes and Excludes, for any drive assignment changes you made. I then powered off and attached the unRAID flash to my computer ... When I restarted the unRAID system it started a parity check, which looks like it will take a few hours to complete. Is this normal behavior? Can I create a new syslog.txt while this is happening? Always make sure you Stop the array first, before powering off. If you don't, on the next boot, it recognizes an improper shutdown and starts a parity check, just like Windows may start a ScanDisk if you did not correctly Shutdown the computer. You can copy the syslog at any time.
November 15, 200817 yr That 'syslot' was the correct one. The errors are gone, system looks fine! It appears to be PCI-bound as the sync speed was a little slow (around 18MB/sec), even for an 8 drive all IDE system. The speed of the drives was fine, all 8 were set to UDMA/100. Adding an inexpensive SiI3132 card and a SATA II drive connected to it, and moving parity to the SATA drive would make a real difference. However, in normal operation, you should see good performance, since most access is not simultaneous. See the Improving unRAID Performance page for some tips. A curiosity, prior to formatting them, all but one of your drives had exactly 4 partitions, which is rather unusual. (The other one, hdm, was empty.) Was that a convention from work perhaps? I'm not familiar with Tom's handout, but what I can say is, the drives are assigned exactly as you want them on the Devices tab. If you would like to change the disk numbers, you can, with care, by re-assigning them on that tab, and then following this procedure: Make unRAID Trust the Parity Drive, Avoid Rebuilding Parity Unnecessarily. Because you just did a Parity Check, you can abort this one, but let it finish a few percent at least. Be very careful to follow the instructions exactly. Most importantly, don't re-assign the parity drive. If you have configured User Shares, make sure you also adjust the Includes and Excludes, for any drive assignment changes you made. I then powered off and attached the unRAID flash to my computer ... When I restarted the unRAID system it started a parity check, which looks like it will take a few hours to complete. Is this normal behavior? Can I create a new syslog.txt while this is happening? Always make sure you Stop the array first, before powering off. If you don't, on the next boot, it recognizes an improper shutdown and starts a parity check, just like Windows may start a ScanDisk if you did not correctly Shutdown the computer. You can copy the syslog at any time. That parity sync speed is not that slow... I used to see anywhere from 15-17 MB/s when I had the same number of IDE drives. Looks like you are off to a good start... These folks with an all SATA server are spoiled with their parity check speeds.. It is over 8 hours for my array... Enjoy your server, I've had mine since Oct 2005, and it is running very nicely. (and I'm still adding drives, have 13 now, and about to add a 14th.) Joe L.
November 15, 200817 yr I can second the speed of an IDE system. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=User_Benchmarks If you take a look at the user benchmark page you'll see a mixture of speeds.
November 15, 200817 yr Author A curiosity, prior to formatting them, all but one of your drives had exactly 4 partitions, which is rather unusual. (The other one, hdm, was empty.) Was that a convention from work perhaps? Those drives came from Buffalo Terastations - I couldn't get them to play nicely with Windows Vista (and tech support was terrible). Since I have several of these Buffalo units with IDE drives I asked Tom to make me an IDE system so that I could at least use the drives. That parity sync speed is not that slow... I used to see anywhere from 15-17 MB/s when I had the same number of IDE drives. Looks like you are off to a good start... These folks with an all SATA server are spoiled with their parity check speeds.. It is over 8 hours for my array... I also have an all SATA system that Tom built for me a couple of weeks ago - what a great product! Thanks so much to both of you for all of your help! Will transfer some test files tonight and see how things work. Franklin
November 15, 200817 yr Author It appears to be PCI-bound as the sync speed was a little slow (around 18MB/sec), even for an 8 drive all IDE system. The speed of the drives was fine, all 8 were set to UDMA/100. Adding an inexpensive SiI3132 card and a SATA II drive connected to it, and moving parity to the SATA drive would make a real difference. However, in normal operation, you should see good performance, since most access is not simultaneous. See the Improving unRAID Performance page for some tips. Tom warned me about this, but I have to confess I didn't fully understand the limitations at the time I ordered an all IDE system. I wouldn't be opposed to giving this a try if it isn't overly difficult. Would it be as easy as purchasing a PCI-E SATA card, disconnecting the current IDE parity drive from the motherboard, replacing current IDE parity drive with SATA II drive and connecting to SATA card, and then restarting system? Is there any special configuring that I would have to do to make the PCI-E SATA card work - this might be a little more challenging than my current abilities? Franklin
November 16, 200817 yr It depends on what motherboard you have. I know the original board had to SATA I ports on it so you could start with that however it will only bump the transfer rate to 150. If Tom used a newer motherboard than it more than likely already has SATA II ports on it. So you wouldn't have to buy an add in card for your parity drive just a HD. Erik
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