I am researching building a media server and stumbled across unRAID. I am really liking what I have read so far and want to give it a go. I want to transition my old PC hardware to the server but want to make sure it is compatible. I am running the FOXCONN C51XEM2AA (nForce 590 SLI) http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186098

 

This is not listed on the wiki, but does anyone see any reason it would not work? Thanks for any help you can provide.

I would say chances are good that it will be fine, but can't be confirmed until someone tries it.  My board is very similar.  Prepare a flash with the free version and test it.

I agree with RobJ. I think the board is new enough that you should be fine.  I would update the BIOS to the latest version and then try the free version on a flash drive.  If you get it t work let us know and we can add it to the Hardware Compatibility Page.

Original poster never stated what the outcome is...?

 

I have a Foxconn C51XEM2AA- 8EKRS2H AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard that i purchased from newegg a while back (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186098). I have a AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz Socket AM2 125W Dual-Core Processor in it with (2) Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PDC24G6400ELK for a total of 8gb of ram, never did much with it, but its in a nice case to be able to hold 9 hard drives.

 

I tried about a year ago building a NAS with it. I tried 2 products,  I just dont remember if unRaid was the one that booted up but did not like the HD controller (it is a AMD 590 SLI chipset with that nvidia raid controller, you can turn it on and off) but it did not like it at all, OR it was the one that just would not boot up at all...

 

Is ANYONE out there able to run unRaid on this MB? Please let me know, I am looking to purchase unRAID Pro and max this out. As I have PLEX and a media library going in the house now and with a daugther tons of pictures/home movies coming in so I really need a NAS now. And from my research I believe unRaid is the way to go for me. But I dont wish to sink in money out side of HD's and hoping this MB can and will work. If there is no one out there, is there a number I can call unRaid techsupport that could help me?

 

 

I think the only advice we can give is to load the free version of unRAID onto a flash drive, add several drives, and try it.  If you can build an array, boot without problems, and access it without issues across the network, then it should work OK.  You can try email support, listed on the Limetech Support web page, but I don't think they have much experience with motherboards like this.

Hey guys, how are you.

 

Here is where I am at with this motherboard. I ran into the "Bootice" article http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9081.msg86662#msg86662

and thought it was cool and prepped one usb stick via the instructions on that post. The second usb stick per unRAID right click format Fat32 "UNRAID" and run make_bootable.bat.

Both unRAID 4.7 AIO

 

Long story short, this MB will only boot from the Bootice process USB stick. The other one instantly hangs, does NOT boot at ALL, not even to the menu. The light on (its a cruzer) dims on and off slowly as if the stick is asleep. I took that stick to work and it booted right up on a spare machine I had. So i brought the bootice stick to work as well it too booted fast, so not the stick (same brand, size, etc..) not the format process and same version of unRAID. so its a MB Bios thing, right?

 

I also noticed it takes a VERY long time to bootup (decompressing or loading) bzimage/bzroot. 12 lines about 3 minutes. At work both these stick load up in a few seconds, the '.' dots just fly through the same 12 sets of lines. So it got me thinking maybe USB 1.1? Bios is set to 1.1/2.0, I checked the manual and yep it supports usb 2.0. I booted from each and every USB port, no difference. But then I remembered I installed unMenu and the packages installed VERY fast even the unRAID - WEB package.

 

Preclear is working fine, web interface, etc.. all fine. So I start thinking the crappy bios only supports 1.1 on boot from USB (they call it REMOTE boot device in the bios). And once unRAID/linux loads the usb driver it switches to usb 2.0; can that be possible? because that is what it feels like.

 

Do any of these things above ring a bell to anyone? it just hit me, I have 8 gb of memory installed (tested and good memory) but could that play with boot ups?

 

I am ok with longer reboots, which will not happen much once I go production with it. I just want to make sure this thing is stable. I also try unRAID5-beta5b just to see if there was any difference, samething. But all seems well once it is up. I read that don't add anything to the syslinux.cfg unless it will not boot at all, so i did not change any defaults at all.

 

The board supports ACPI and I noticed the syslog shows everything it did upon boot up. So I am attaching url link's to 2 documents; each containing the syslog of boot up from each version of unRAID. on this MB I disable IDE so I think the one error is pertaining to that, so that should be OK i think? NV590 chipset, 6 onboard SATAII ports, no add-on cards yet but I have one coming in.

 

I hope you seasoned guys can shed some light by checking out my syslogs and give me a tumbs up or down or tweak. Many thanks.

 

unRAID 4.7 AIO syslog:

http://www.private-network.com/unRAID/unRAID4.7.docx

 

unRAID 5-beta5b syslog:

http://www.private-network.com/unRAID/unRAID5b.docx

 

 

Bump, please let me know if u prefer a different method I should attach the syslog files for review. I have the syslog data put into word documents and links to them above. Much appreciated.

I think the last time I had a running word processor on my machine was 20 to 25 years ago, when I used WordStar for all my programming in text mode!  I occasionally help relatives with word processing issues and installation help, so I could probably find a machine with Open Office and convert your docs, but if you don't mind, I would REALLY prefer to get the original raw text syslog.  Using compare tools on differing file formats is also problematic, and while it is probably not needed for your case, they do help me isolate what is different between 2 syslogs of similar machines or sessions.

So sorry, found them in a second, didn't even think they were being stored somewhere, one more thing I learned today. I tried attaching one but system stated attachement was to large (>197k) so here is the link were I dropped a copy for you. Thank you again for taking the time out to reply.

 

=http://www.private-network.com/unRAID/syslog-20110303-225318.txt

 

Just incase I performed a fresh reboot just now and added that syslog file as well:

 

http://www.private-network.com/unRAID/syslog-20110304-010929.txt

Your 4.7 syslog looks healthy to me.  The 5.0b5b has some errors at the end, but I don't know if those are caused by your system or by the beta's instability (more likely).  I suggest staying with 4.7 until 5.0 is stable.

 

I've found boot times to vary drastically across different systems.  Sometimes the motherboard is slow and the flash drive is fast.  Sometimes the opposite is true.  Sometimes both are slow.  Sometimes they vary on even the same system as the drive's journals are replayed.  As long as it does eventually boot and work correctly, I would say just don't worry about it.  As you said, you won't be rebooting too often anyway.

Just looking at the v4.7 syslogs, I have to concur with Rajahal.  The system appears to be booting at normal speed (no indication otherwise), and then setup optimally.  The only complaint I would have is that you appear to have a gigabit network chipset, but it is being setup at 100mb/s, which will restrict your reads and writes to about 10MB/s.  That is only a problem if you were positive it *should* be running at gigabit speeds.

 

All I can suggest, with very low confidence that they will make any difference:

* try booting with only 2GB or 4GB of RAM

* play with the BIOS settings for USB support - it clearly sounds like it is booting at 1.0 or 1.1 USB speeds

* make sure you use the very latest version of syslinux.exe to prepare the flash

* check for a newer BIOS update

 

When a syslog is too large to attach, we just zip it.  They compress very well because of so much redundancy.

THANK YOU Guys 

 

I am on a 100 meg switch at the moment, hopefully going GB soon, so I will look out that this does change onec I switch. So it is correct at the momet (good looking out!).

 

I will put 2 memory stick to lower to 4GB never hurts in my stage of the game. But i feel the same it probably will not do anything different. I will post results.

 

There has been NO BIOS updates by Foxconn in year for this board, they published one or two ( I have the latest) and pretty much abandanded it. Yet sold it my it was a rocket ship (Clearly with no one to pilot it  ) I have two of them... bought at the same time back in 07. I dont believe I can use another bios on it (not a guru with this type of stuff, so if theres somethign let me know).

 

The BIOS setting for USB go as followed "Disabled/V1.1/V1.1+2.0', another one is disable USB Keyboard, Disabled USB Mouse, thats it, no emulation modes, NOTHING, like other boards do.

 

I saw last night with a flash, right between it showing initalized disk by controller and PCI mapping a FLASH showing USB v1.1 (so I am not crazy, believe me when I say it take about 3 FULL minutes to boot) but once it does its fast. Not the end of the world most important is its stable once up (everything that needs to load, actually loads, etc...). precleared all my disks twice now, no issues expect for one disk having 5 reallocated sectors (old 320GB Deskstar 7k).

 

I will also try "make sure you use the very latest version of syslinux.exe to prepare the flash", does that mean just copy the exe to the root or more than that? As so far unless I use the Bootice exe to format no usb stick boot on this board.

 

 

 

Well, I removed the 2 sticks of memory as requested to try (went from 8gb to 4gb), unRAID booted and the syslog was the same.

 

And now I finally got to the last recommendation by RobJ  "* make sure you use the very latest version of syslinux.exe to prepare the flash". I downloaded syslinux-4.03.zip lastest they had posted on their site. Unzipped, went to the Win32 directory, copied the syslinux.exe to root of flash/root of USB stick/Boot (depending what you call it.). I ran the unraid provided "make_bootable.bat" as that is all set to execute the syslinux.exe that it there and detects the drive letter the usb stick is pluged into on my PC. It did its thing. I plugged the usb key back into the unRAID box and got the follwoing message upon trying to boot "menu.c32: not a COM32R image". So now its dead in the water.

 

So as i was doing this, a question popped into my head, why would I even be doing this? wouldnt unRAID already provide the latest or latest working version of syslinux with the 4.7 AIO download? Maybe unRaid even complies something custom with there syslinux?

 

There was also a Win64 directory with a syslinux64.exe in there, but I dont believe unRaid is running 64 bit...?

 

Can someone clarify if I did something wrong or was this a bad idea....

 

Syslinux is a separate and independent project, separate from unRAID, from the kernel, and even from Slackware, the Linux distro that unRAID is based on.  It is a boot loader, included by Lime Technology for preparing boot flash disks.  Probably over 99% of users have had no problems using it, but there have been a few cases where a newer version worked, which is why I suggested it.  As far as I know, there have only been 2 different versions of syslinux.exe provided, the current v3.72 and an older one previously.  When I recommended trying the latest, I was completely unaware of the new v4 series of Syslinux, apparently a complete rewrite of the code base.  I suspect it may require a newer menu.c32, of the corresponding code base.  I don't know that for sure though.

 

There is a newer syslinux version of the v3 series, v3.86 - found here, which may possibly help you, but again, there is only a low probability of this being the solution you need.  I'm afraid there have been a few cases, of a particular combination of flash drive and motherboard, where the user never succeeded in getting it to boot.

 

Just in case you had not seen it, check the USB Flash Drive Preparation page for more ideas.  It has not been updated in a while though.

No worries RobJ. Sorry I was off-line due to heavy work-load. But did want to reply back. I did see the 3.86 version later that night and tried that as well. The stick was once again bootable. I compared the syslog against the version of syslinux the bootice process applied versus the newest 3.86 and saw no difference at all. The exercise was good for knowledge. It boils down to this board does not allow booting usb devices faster than 1.1. All else seems to work well once unraid initializes.

 

I am waiting on the 1x PCI-E SATAII cards i ordered on eBay (from HK) to come in to test the PCI-e slot on this board and will report back how they worked out, should anyone else use this board. I picked up on this post as the original poster never replied back if he was able to get unraid to boot and run on this MB. Clearly it can be.

 

Many thanks to all.