[SOLVED] Old motherboard won't start with XFS formatted drives?

[thespooler]

I'm experimenting with the trial copy of Unraid.  I'm using an old NF4 board, specifically the DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra D.  It booted my 2 4TB HGST NAS drives no problem.  I spent a few days in Unraid playing around.  And I shut it down so I could run preclear on a Seagate 4TB I just removed from an external case.  When I started the system back up, it would POST, the drives would be detected, but I couldn't enter set up or continue.  I could CTRL-ALT-DEL, but otherwise it was hung.  Through trial and error and combinations of cables, nothing worked so I removed the HGST drives and just started up with the Seagate attached.  Ran preclear, 120 hours later, it's done, I restart, and now the Seagate has the same problem.  It's pretty clear at this point, that the BIOS is trying to do something with the XFS file system and ends up hung.  Have others experienced this?  I tried turning off all HD settings that might circumvent the issues (booting, smart, etc) but haven't lucked into any setting that has worked. I'll try hot plugging them when Unraid is running.  But not sure this motherboard supports that.  Any ideas?

[mr-hexen]

I wonder if there is a BIOS backup function in the BIOS similar to what gigabyte used to do.

 

 

What the BIOS does it put a backup of itself onto an installed disk. Perhaps this is failing on a XFS formatted drive causing it to hang.

 

Poke around the BIOS for such a setting and turn it off!

[itimpi]

I wonder if there is a BIOS backup function in the BIOS similar to what gigabyte used to do.

 

 

What the BIOS does it put a backup of itself onto an installed disk. Perhaps this is failing on a XFS formatted drive causing it to hang.

 

Poke around the BIOS for such a setting and turn it off!

As was mentioned, I cannot believe that it is the fact that the drive is XFS formatted that is the issue as a BIOS should not be file system aware.  You could test this by formatting a disk to BTRFS or Reiserfs and seeing if the symptoms change.  Much more likely to be something else although it is not clear what it might be.

[thespooler]

I'm shocked as well.  The HSTs were not formatted at all.  The Seagate was FAT32 prior to the preclear.  There is a BIOS and CMOS backup option, but it's to NVRAM.  If I disable SATA, I can boot, if I plug in the original Windows drive, I can boot.

 

With the 4TB drives I'm stuck at the "Press DEL to enter BIOS, Press ESC to enter Boot Menu" option.  I was kind of surprised 4TB drives worked, maybe it's an Advanced Format issue, if Unraid aligned the drives?

 

 

 

 

[mr-hexen]

hmm... whats your boot order? Take hard drives off the boot order completely and use just the USB stick.

[thespooler]

I had the HDs removed from the boot order already.  The first bootable device was REMOVABLE which is where the USB is listed under, everything else was disabled.

 

I just solved the problem.  I changed the SATA settings "Extended IDE Drive" from Auto to None, which existed for each drive and now BIOS makes no attempt to detect or talk to the drive.  It doesn't show up in the POST screen at all, like it did before where it would then hang.  But Linux still sees them.  That BIOS setting was fine before Unraid formatted them, but no good after.

 

Maybe it doesn't understand GPT.