Unable to get unRaid 5.0 to detect 5th hard drive on Intel D975XBX motherboard

[luke8907]

I have an Intel D975XBX motherboard with 8 SATA ports on it. I filled the first 4 ports controlled via the ICH7DH, with a 4 TB parity drive, two 3 TB data drives, and a 4 TB data drive and unRaid detected everything just fine and everything has been working just great. I need to add another 4 TB drive and the motherboard has a second set of 4 SATA ports that are controlled via the discrete RAID controller (Marvell as far as I can tell). I add the drive and go to the unRaid browser window to find the drive and assign it to the array but under array devices on the main screen I click on disk 4 which is unassigned and the new disk is not there to be assigned. I checked the BIOS before unRaid boots and I do see the new drive listed amongst choices for boot order, so I believe the drive is seen by the motherboard. I'm wondering if unRaid does not see the SATA ports 5 through 8. I did run the command dmesg|grep SATA|grep link and I only see ata1 through 4 listed. I'm not a linux expert and I'm not quite sure what to do to get unRaid to recognize the remaining SATA ports so that I can add more drives. I'll attach my system log if someone could take a look and see what they think. Any advice would be appreciated.

system_log.txt

[dirtysanchez]

I'm no Linux syslog expert, but I'll see if I can help.  The Marvell controller shows up in the syslog, so the system at least sees it.

 

What mode is the Marvell chipset set to in the BIOS?  Is it IDE?  It needs to be set to SATA.

 

Also, your flash drive has some errors on it.  Shut down the server, pull the flash drive, mount it on a Windows machine, and run a checkdisk on it.

[Frank1940]

Another thing to check is to make sure that the Second controller is not setup to a a RAID controller.  unRAID expects that RAID controllers are set to the JBOD (just a bunch of disks) mode.

[luke8907]

Thanks for the advice, I will pull my flash drive that unRaid is on and run check disk on it as you suggested. I will triple check things in the BIOS but if I remember correctly the SATA settings are set to AHCI because the other choices are IDE and RAID which I know I don't want. There is no place in the BIOS settings that I remember seeing relating directly to the Marvell controller although a screen does display during bootup that says press CTRL+M to enter and it looked like only something to mess with as far as setting up a RAID config with the Marvell controller. Anyway, I will try to check it out withing the next 3 or 4 days (when I get time) and report back what I can find. Thanks again!

[luke8907]

Hey guys,

 

Finally had time to work on my issue again. I ran the chkdsk on the drive and put it back in, still not showing the remaining 4 sata ports controlled by the Marvell 6145 chipset though. Anyway, I searched the forums here again and found the answer!!! This is the link to the post http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=16860.msg153810#msg153810 There is a known problem with how unRAID interacts with the Marvell 6145 controller and the workaround to fix the problem was to add three lines to the go file on the flash drive. I added

 

root@Tower:/boot# rmmod pata_marvell

root@Tower:/boot# rmmod ahci

root@Tower:/boot# modprobe ahci marvell_enable=1

 

I rebooted unRAID and sure enough, the remaining ports were displayed and at the GUI browser console I saw my new drive in the drop down box and was able to assign it to the array!

 

Problem solved, thanks alot to dgaschk who supplied the fix!

[dirtysanchez]

Glad you got it working!