I'm having trouble with a new system I'm building for a friend. I've narrowed the problem down to some combination of the controller I'm using (a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8), and the inclusion of a 12-bay SAS expansion chassis. With everything connected but no drives in any of the bays, everything boots properly and I can even see via dmesg that the controller has successfully detected and discovered the SAS expansion. However, as soon as I put a single drive (1TB WD Red) into the chassis, there's a 50/50 chance that I'll get the attached error. This can happen if I attempt to boot the machine with a drive installed, or if I boot the machine with no drives, then insert a drive the error will occur immediately after drive insertion. Unfortunately I can only take photos, since when the error occurs the system hard crashes, so I can't even grab syslog or anything.

 

Some specifics:

-Running unRAID 5.0.4 Plus

-AOC-SASLP-MV8 upgraded to FW 3.0.1.21

-unRAID boots fine with drives connected directly to Mobo's built in SATA controller

-Just to test, I booted from a Ubuntu 13.10 live CD and was able to insert and mount a drive without a problem. This would suggest to me it's maybe a problem in the version of libsas or mvsas included with unRAID... ??

 

Unfortunately I don't have another SAS controller to test with the expansion chassis, nor do I have a SFF-8087 to SATA cable to test connecting the drives directly to the controller. Though, given how well these controllers seem to be regarded on this forum, I imagine it's not a problem with the controller itself...

 

Does anyone have any suggestions? Recommendations? Can I provide any additional information that would be helpful? Is there a way to make syslog persistent across reboots so maybe we could see the whole debug trace?

 

Thanks in advance for any help,

 

-A

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but I wanted to post my solution in case others may run into this same issue.

 

I started receiving this error out of the blue recently, which caused unRAID to crash... hard.  Initially I thought it was an extension of another issue I've been troubleshooting related to the file system crashing (transport endpoint errors), but after more reboots, the array came back missing all the disks associated with my SASLP-MV8.  I found this thread, which exhibited the same console screen upon crash (with only minor variations to the hash/memory addresses or what not), pointing to the MV8, so it seemed like that was the culprit.  I ordered a SAS expander for my M1015, and once it arrived, fired up the array again (sans MV8), and it successfully completed its parity check and I've been running solid for the last few days.  In defense of the MV8, it did last me through 2 rebuilds and was on 24/7 for almost 4 years.  I think I got my moneys worth.

 

So... recursive fault with "ata_", "sata_" and "sas_" messages is likely related to a SAS/SATA card.

 

Figured I'd respond just for the sake of completeness. 

 

That was my solution as well. For lack of other options, I wound up replacing the SASLP-MV8 with an IBM m1015 (flashed to IT mode) back in early January. It's be humming along nicely ever since.

 

-A