I just replaced the motherboard in my main backup UnRaid server and I thought I put the drives back in the same order but it appears not to be the case, many are reporting 'wrong' I assume because they are in the wrong position.

 

I also have a drive reporting as missing that I am trying to resolve.

 

What can I do here? Am I going to have to figure out how to get the drives back in their original position?

 

Do I just let UnRaid record the new disk positions and mount the array? Will I lose any data?

 

 

Anyone? I don't know what to do here and don't want to risk losing data if I can avoid it.

You shouldn't have had to do ANYTHING except just connect all the drives and boot to the flash drive.  v6 tracks drives by serial #, so it should have simply booted.

 

Did you manually assign all your drives with the new board?    Or redo your flash drive?

 

 

 

Your picture also shows a LOT of drives being shown with the right serial # but the wrong SIZE.    It's as if the controller you're using may not support drives > 2TB.    Have you changed the controller you're using -- or is this an older motherboard that may require a BIOS update to recognize the larger drives?

 

I literally just plugged everything back in, I am kind of surprised its reporting drives in the wrong slots. I have four Icy Dock cages, each containing four drives, I supposed its possible I put them back in the wrong order, but I left the cables from the raid controller connected and they are labeled 0-3 so unless I plugged those back into the raid controller in the wrong order, which I am pretty sure I didn't.

 

Same controller, and the Areca BIOS was already at a level that supported 2GB> it worked fine on my previous board.

 

What do I do next?

I suspect the serial numbers match the raid card ports not the drives. I also suspect you have plugged drives into different cards somehow despite your efforts to avoid that.

 

You could try moving cables around to match things up again or do an init config and re assign them all.

I think mr-hexen has it right. The drives that it gets right are reporting actual manufacturer's drive serial numbers so those must be on the motherboard and your controller is where the problem is. Surprised we haven't seen this sort of thing before.

What does an init config involve?

 

What would happen if I just start the array and let UnRaid note the drives the way they are now?

What would happen if I just start the array and let UnRaid note the drives the way they are now?

 

NO !!  You definitely don't want to do that, since the drives are being seen as the wrong SIZE.

 

What would happen if I just start the array and let UnRaid note the drives the way they are now?

 

NO !!  You definitely don't want to do that, since the drives are being seen as the wrong SIZE.

 

What he means is Old Testament, ashman, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

I'm going to be gone for an hour or so -- so can't respond right away.    But I'd do the following ...

 

(1)  Be CERTAIN you know the drive serial # and SIZE for all of your drives.    You may want to pull them out of the cages; note that info; and then re-insert them and keep a "map" of what drives are in which slot.

 

(2)  Be CERTAIN you know which drive is the parity drive and which is the cache drive [i assume those are already correctly shown, so you simply need to write down the serial #'s

 

(3)  Now I'd do a New Config (which will erase the current configuration);  and then BEFORE you assign any drives, look at the SIZES shown for all of the drives and see if they're all shown correctly -- just look at one of the assignment "pull-downs", which will show all available drives ... and then compare them to your list of drives.    If any aren't shown as the correct size, note WHERE they are in your system and which controller they're connected to.

 

WHEN ... and ONLY WHEN ... all of the drives are shown as the correct size; then you can assign all of the data drives (doesn't matter which goes to which position); and you can assign the parity drive ... and as long as you're CERTAIN you haven't done any writes to the system since it was last working correctly you can check the "parity is already valid" box; and the system will be ready to Start.    If any doubts about the validity of parity, don't check that box, and let it do a parity sync.

 

HOWEVER ... if ANY drives are shown as the wrong size, you need to determine WHY.  See if the ones being shown as the wrong size are all connected to the same controller (e.g. the onboard SATA ports).

 

I've got further problems now. I reversed the order of the drives on my Areca raid controller, and now my system is caught in a boot loop not sure why. It just reboots and reboots and reboots.

 

I put the cables on my Areca back, and still it boot loops. I even went into the BIOS and then boot menu and picked my USB flash drive and it still rebooted.

 

Anyone got any ideas, I'm starting to pull my hair out at this point. I've even removed my Areca card from the system, it still reboots. Not sure what else I can do here.

 

I've tried my flash drive in a different USB slot, system still rebooted. I've loaded BIOS defaults, still reboots.

 

There definitely seems to be something wrong with my flash drive now, it simply won't boot to it, it just reboots the system. I can't believe I'm having such bad luck. I don't have a backup of my flash drive either.

Okay, first step is do not panic ... as long as you don't do anything with the drives, your data is safe (hopefully you also have backups, but nevertheless there shouldn't be any issue with the data on the drives as long as you don't do anything that could possibly write to them).

 

Before assuming this is a flash drive issue, see what happens if you disconnect EVERYTHING from the system [no Areca controller; no flash drive; no hard drives] and turn it on.    Can you get to the BIOS okay?

 

Next, take a spare flash drive; download the free version of v5; and create a bootable flash drive with it.    Then boot to THAT flash drive and see if it boots okay.    [if so, you should be able to go to the Web GUI -- don't do anything, just confirm that works.]    If it boots okay, reboot and select the MemTest option => and let MemTest run for a few hours.

 

If you can't boot to the new flash drive, then you most likely have a problem with this motherboard.  Double-check that you have it mounted correctly [be sure you have standoffs in the right places and that all of the cables are connected correctly -- i.e. both the ATX and aux CPU power cables are firmly seated and the front panel connections are all firmly connected.    If necessary, remove the board to check the standoffs -- although you can likely just compare the standoff locations with your old board to see if there's any chance you've got a short somewhere due to a standoff you didn't remove that's no longer in use.

 

If you can boot okay to the board with a new flash drive, you may want to connect a couple of drives to the SATA ports and see if they show up okay in the Web GUI -- do NOT assign any of them ... just see if they're shown correctly.    This will let you confirm that the ports are working okay and that they can see your drives that are > 2TB in size.

 

If you get that far, post back with your status and we'll do the next steps ...

 

I can get to the BIOS just fine although I just saw a message saying 'overlcocking failed' when I hadn't set that up, so no sure what thats all about. I guess my next step will be to download a copy of V5 and try that on a new flash drive. Really don't know whats going on with this system, I put the board in today and it was running ok, was having issues with one drive not showing up but I could boot into UnRaid no problem until this started happening.

 

Thanks for helping with this.

Back in business. I did a BIOS update which seemed for whatever reason, to resolve things, I also reversed the order of the four break out cables on my Areca and that put all the drives back in the right places.

 

Thanks for everyones help.

 

AM

... I did a BIOS update which seemed for whatever reason, to resolve things ...

 

 

Glad all's well.    I'm not surprised the BIOS update resolved it => I suspect this updated the board to support > 2TB drives, several of which were clearly not being recognized earlier (likely the ones connected to the motherboard ports).

 

As I noted in my first post ...

...  is this an older motherboard that may require a BIOS update to recognize the larger drives?

 

The issue here is that your controllers are not passing the disks model and serial, but the SAS addresses, so unraid has no way of knowing what is the actual disk connected, it will however complain if you have a different size in the same slot, that’s what happened with several disks.

 

Lucky for you your parity and the other 5tb disk are connected on another controller (onboard?) or unraid could have mix them up and that could lead to data loss.

 

You’re current config is probably the same as the previous, but If you’re including/excluding disks in your shares make sure they’re actually the same.