Hey All,

 

So I have a mix of Samsung and WD drives on a p5e-vm-do board with two Super Miicro 5-3 drive cage and two sata removable drive bays as well.

 

I run 6 sata drives on the board and 5 on two Promise 300TX4 of which I have never had issues with. I got a 1TB for christmas and finally got around to installing it.

 

I hook the new Samsung to the 2nd port on the 2nd 300TX4 (actually now drive 12) and powerup. It finds all the drives no sweat and my Kingston Flash but no boot. If I go and check it out in the bios The USB drive is under USB and it is set to emulate auto I have tried forcing it to HDD with no luck. If I move over to the boot section and peak at my hard drives I have 12 Hard drive but the kingston is not on the list and it almost seems like the new smasing is detected twice drive 1 which use to be my kingston is now ide : sataTX$ D5 and the 12th drive is also a SATA PM Samsung HD.

 

As soon as I remove the drive and reboot the Kingston is back in it's place.

 

I also tried moving a drive off te board and onto the promise card and then plug the samsung into the open sata port on the board and still the same issue.

 

If I try the drive in another machine it is detect and there does not seem to be any faults. This is a brand new drive unused.

 

OH and I did try a few different sata cables and even tried with the drive out of the cage and connected directly to the port on the controller with the same results.

 

Thanks,

 

Dave

It is a BIOS issue... if an upgrade to your motherboard's BIOS does not help, here are a few threads with ideas that worked for others in the same situation:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2653.msg21677#msg21677

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2302.0

 

Apparently, they really don't test some BIOS ability to boot from the USB drive with lots of other hard disks present very well.

 

Joe L.

Follow these instructions ...

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2302.msg17664#msg17664

Many Thanks,

 

That did the trick. I found this so strange and was thinking all along that the samsung and the promise did not like each other. But Unraid is Clearing the new drive right now.

 

I have another quick question, why is it sometimes when you put in a new drive and it gets detected and only requires formatting and then some drives need to be assigned,  cleared and then formatted. 

 

This one did not get autodetected as a new disk, I had to assign it and then hit start to begin.

 

 

  Thanks,

 

Dave

That did the trick.

 

Glad to hear it!

 

... why is it sometimes when you put in a new drive and it gets detected and only requires formatting and then some drives need to be assigned,  cleared and then formatted. 

 

This one did not get autodetected as a new disk, I had to assign it and then hit start to begin.

 

When you add a new disk, you have to go into the unRAID web interface, stop the array, go to the devices tab, assign the new disk to a slot, go back to the main tab, and start the array.  UnRAID will begin to clear the disk, but you can format it during the clear process.  (JoeL. created a script that would pre-clear the disk and mark it in a special way to allow unRAID to skip the clear step.  His script also exercises the disk pretty thoroughly, so it is a good burn in test as well.  If you do this you can avoid clearing the disk when you actually add it to the array, although you'd still have to format it).

 

The only time adding a disk should be different from this is when you are replacing a failed disk.  In this case, when you boot, unRAID will automatically assign the new disk to the failed disk's slot.  When you start the array it will rebuild onto the disk.

 

Are you seeing something different than one of these two scenarios?

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for that explanation and no I am not, it has just been a long time since I added a brand new disk, all the new disks I have installed replaced a good working drive only for more drivepsace.

 

So I remember now after reading your post about adding new drives and the process. I remebered having to add them to to the list prior to starting the array and clearing the drive so all is grand.

 

I find that if I keep old drives on like a 6 month cycle, I can replace, format and test the old one and sell them on the local used site and get back at least half of what I am paying for the new drive. I sold the last two 500's I had about 3 months ago for 50 a piece which almost covered the cost of one of my new 1 TB drives. I do not know what I am going to do when they are all 1TB drives in the server. Oh! well have to starting installing 1.5TB drives I guess once they have another year or so to make them stable from what I have read.

 

Thanks Again,

 

Dave