New Motherboard

[jj0076]

Hi folks,

so my unraid server stopped working last night. It was fine yesterday morning, but when I tried to access files in the evening the server was unresponsive. I tried the web gui and logging in via telnet and pinging the server, all got me nothing. All the fans were still up and the hard drive lights were all on. I had no choice but to kill the power and go a for a reboot, but still nothing. I've done some further work and testing and have noticed that there is no POST beep from the motherboard, and no display when I hooked up a monitor. Power still comes on and all the fans kick in, it just does nothing. I have tried another video card, still the same. Onyl things left to do are to check the RAM and the power supply, but I'm preparing for the worst and trying to plan for a faulty motherboard.

 

If this is the case, is it pretty straightforward to swap out my motherboard? Will I need to do anything to my settings on my flash drive or will it just boot up and resume ok? What worries me is that I cannot access my current BIOS to make a note of any special settings that are turned on...will this be likely to cause me problems?

 

Finally, if anyone has any advice of other things to check first, that would be appreciated. A work colleague has already suggested that I pull the video card and the RAM and then boot to see if an error code is produced or if there is still a deathly silence!!

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

[itimpi]

Normally it is just a case of plugging the unRAID USB drive into the new system and it should all come up as it was with minimal effort

 

Things you might want to check in the BIOS.

• The SATA drives are set to AHCI mode and not IDE mode
  
• The system is set to boot from the USB drive
  
• Any virtualisation features are enabled
  

[jj0076]

Normally it is just a case of plugging the unRAID USB drive into the new system and it should all come up as it was with minimal effort

 

Things you might want to check in the BIOS.

• The SATA drives are set to AHCI mode and not IDE mode
  
• The system is set to boot from the USB drive
  
• Any virtualisation features are enabled
  

Great stuff, thanks, I thought it should be straight forward. Just one thing...what exactly do you mean by virtualisation features?

[itimpi]

Normally it is just a case of plugging the unRAID USB drive into the new system and it should all come up as it was with minimal effort

 

Things you might want to check in the BIOS.

• The SATA drives are set to AHCI mode and not IDE mode
  
• The system is set to boot from the USB drive
  
• Any virtualisation features are enabled
  

Great stuff, thanks, I thought it should be straight forward. Just one thing...what exactly do you mean by virtualisation features?

If you want to use VM's then you need to enable hardware virtualisation features in the BIOS.  Quite what these will be called varies according to the exact BIOS and processor type you have (and not all motherboard/processor combinations support them anyway).  They are not required for basic unRAID use so you can start initially without them although it is one of the features of v6 that many want to use.

 

When unRAID is running you can check what virtualisation features (if any) are enabled by pressing the Info button in the unRAID GUI.  If basic virtualisation feature is enabled (required to run any type of VM) then it will say HVM is enabled (most modern systems support this).  The next level (that only some motherboard/processor combinations support) that is required to support hardware passthru to VM's is shown by whether IOMMU is enabled.

[jj0076]

Thanks

[jj0076]

So, trouble shooting this broken system is proving harder than I first thought. I wonder if anyone would like to offer suggestions...

 

As I described above the motherboard was giving me no post beep and no display out. So I removed all power connections and all devices from the motherboard and tried to boot with only the cpu installed. I got an error beep this time and looking it up in the manual it was "no ram installed". So I put the ram back in and got a bad ram error beep. I tried each stick of ram individually in all slots and got error beeps everytime. I guessed that this meant motherboard problem but to be sure I ordered new ram. I installed it and it booted. I then powered down and closed up the case and attached network cable etc. Now when I boot I get cpu fan error. I've checked cabling and the fan is working and spinning up.

 

Based on such a range of errors do you think its safe to assume that it is motherboard problem and just go buy new mb and new cpu?