May 16, 201610 yr New to unRAID. I have a Dell R710 with six 2TB HDDs in a RAID0 using a PERC H700 controller. I downloaded unRAID 6.2 Public Beta and when I went to add disks to the array, nothing shows up but the usb drive I am booting from. I also booted to a live CentOS 7 disk and formatted the 12TB gpt partition to ext4. I tried msdos mode, but 12TB was too big apparently. If gpt is not supported, do I need to create smaller partitions and use msdos partition table? I realize that JBOD mode is preferred, but my H700 controller does not support it. Eventually, I will buy a new HBA, but for now I just want to try unRAID and see if it fits my needs. Can anyone help? Thank you.
May 16, 201610 yr i dont think you can use exisiting raid setups with unraid turn the controller off and add them to the array in unraid webui )
May 16, 201610 yr New to unRAID. I have a Dell R710 with six 2TB HDDs in a RAID0 using a PERC H700 controller. I downloaded unRAID 6.2 Public Beta and when I went to add disks to the array, nothing shows up but the usb drive I am booting from. I also booted to a live CentOS 7 disk and formatted the 12TB gpt partition to ext4. I tried msdos mode, but 12TB was too big apparently. If gpt is not supported, do I need to create smaller partitions and use msdos partition table? I realize that JBOD mode is preferred, but my H700 controller does not support it. Eventually, I will buy a new HBA, but for now I just want to try unRAID and see if it fits my needs. Can anyone help? Thank you. Unraid does not work that way... You do not need to create raid errors on forehand, unraid uses a /kind of/ software-raid (its not raid at all actually).. Just have your disks individually connected, no raid set, startup with the usb stick.. Unraid will take care of providing one JBOD like array with parity on one extra drive (when you add a parity disk).
May 16, 201610 yr unRAID does recognize some existing RAID's, if they are on a recognized controller and present the RAID to the kernel as a single conventional drive. I don't recall anyone using the PERC H700 though, so I strongly suspect unRAID does not include the appropriate driver for it. You can request it by emailing LimeTech support, and there's a good chance it will be included in a future release. unRAID is a lean stripped down distro that runs entirely from RAM, so it strips out everything that isn't absolutely necessary for someone. For an example, there's an Areca driver included, for a small but growing number of users with Areca cards, and they are creating multiple RAID arrays on them, used inside and outside of unRAID arrays (I think!).
May 17, 201610 yr Author unRAID does recognize some existing RAID's, if they are on a recognized controller and present the RAID to the kernel as a single conventional drive. I don't recall anyone using the PERC H700 though, so I strongly suspect unRAID does not include the appropriate driver for it. You can request it by emailing LimeTech support, and there's a good chance it will be included in a future release. unRAID is a lean stripped down distro that runs entirely from RAM, so it strips out everything that isn't absolutely necessary for someone. For an example, there's an Areca driver included, for a small but growing number of users with Areca cards, and they are creating multiple RAID arrays on them, used inside and outside of unRAID arrays (I think!). Thanks Rob, I think you are right. I know I have read stories of people getting unRAID working while using a hardware raid setup but I don't recall any of them using a H700. I think I'll just end up buying a couple of HBAs that allow passthrough. I think I have a Dell H310 in a box somewhere. I'm just not sure which cables I will need to buy for it to interface with the backplane of my Dell R710.
May 17, 201610 yr Author Well, I learned the hard way that flashing a Dell PERC H700 Integrated was a bad idea. I got halfway through it and rebooted and now the R710 immediately says "Invalid PCIe card found in the Internal Storage Slot - System Halted" when it boots. I can't get passed it to flash the card back to Dell firmware.
May 17, 201610 yr Well, I learned the hard way that flashing a Dell PERC H700 Integrated was a bad idea. I got halfway through it and rebooted and now the R710 immediately says "Invalid PCIe card found in the Internal Storage Slot - System Halted" when it boots. I can't get passed it to flash the card back to Dell firmware. Since you are already down, you could try a last ditch effort of hot plugging the card. Boot the system to your flashing environment without the card inserted, then put the card in the slot and try to flash it. Or, muck around in the BIOS and see if there is an option to not scan for card ROMs and see if that helps.
May 19, 201610 yr Author Well, I learned the hard way that flashing a Dell PERC H700 Integrated was a bad idea. I got halfway through it and rebooted and now the R710 immediately says "Invalid PCIe card found in the Internal Storage Slot - System Halted" when it boots. I can't get passed it to flash the card back to Dell firmware. Since you are already down, you could try a last ditch effort of hot plugging the card. Boot the system to your flashing environment without the card inserted, then put the card in the slot and try to flash it. Or, muck around in the BIOS and see if there is an option to not scan for card ROMs and see if that helps. That's not a bad idea. Keep in mind, I can't even get into the BIOS. When I turn it on, it immediately shows the error message and wont let me do anything. I was going to take the card into work where I have access to some Dell OptiPlex machines, and try plugging it into one of those and see if it will let me boot and flash it back. I might try your idea tonight of yanking the card out and booting the server to the boot menu, then sticking the card in and flashing it back. What are the chances of something bad happening if I plug in the card while the system is on?
May 19, 201610 yr Well, I learned the hard way that flashing a Dell PERC H700 Integrated was a bad idea. I got halfway through it and rebooted and now the R710 immediately says "Invalid PCIe card found in the Internal Storage Slot - System Halted" when it boots. I can't get passed it to flash the card back to Dell firmware. Since you are already down, you could try a last ditch effort of hot plugging the card. Boot the system to your flashing environment without the card inserted, then put the card in the slot and try to flash it. Or, muck around in the BIOS and see if there is an option to not scan for card ROMs and see if that helps. That's not a bad idea. Keep in mind, I can't even get into the BIOS. When I turn it on, it immediately shows the error message and wont let me do anything. I was going to take the card into work where I have access to some Dell OptiPlex machines, and try plugging it into one of those and see if it will let me boot and flash it back. I might try your idea tonight of yanking the card out and booting the server to the boot menu, then sticking the card in and flashing it back. What are the chances of something bad happening if I plug in the card while the system is on? In theory, PCIe is hot pluggable. However... in reading the interwebs, I have found some evidence that you may need a good identical card to initialize the slot when the computer boots, then you can swap the bad card in to do the flash. Keep us informed on what happens.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.