Problem:

My new parity disk shows as red ball and says "Not installed".  

 

 

parity Not installed

disk1 ata-ST3500320AS_9QM0EAHW 31°C 488,386,552 357,667,360 94 60 0

disk2 ata-ST3500320AS_9QM26B35 32°C 488,386,552 393,789,760 92 58 0

 

I have a 3 disk system.  Have had 2 data drives with data on both (working fine), and just now adding the 3rd one as the parity disk.  All three are 7200 Barracuda 500GB SATA drives.

 

The first 2 drives are Sata drives connected to PCI sata card.  3rd one is Sata drive connected to a Sata-to-IDE adapter so it's different hardware from the first 2 drives.  See the adapter here if it helps:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186032

Upon powering up Unraid sees the ATA interface to the 3rd drive and I can assign it to the parity device when the array is stopped.  I start the array and the parity drive stays red ball and says "Not installed."  

 

 

Disk devices

parity device: pci-0000:00:07.1-ide-0:0 ide0 (hda) ata-RIDATA_CF_20091126_0123467C

disk1 device: pci-0000:00:0a.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 host0 (sda) ata-ST3500320AS_9QM0EAHW

disk2 device: pci-0000:00:0a.0-scsi-1:0:0:0 host1 (sdb) ata-ST3500320AS_9QM26B35

 

 

Additional:

I have tested the parity drive on a different computer and it works normally.  All 3 drives are Seagate 7200.11 drives so all should be exactly the same size.

If I spin up all drives on the Unraid web page then the parity drive spins up also so it is being seen and controlled by Unraid. 

Can someone look at the attached syslog file and let me know if it looks like the linux system is seeing the new drive correctly?

Is there any indication why Unraid won't start building the parity drive?

 

 

syslog.txt

3rd one is Sata drive connected to a Sata-to-IDE adapter so it's different hardware from the first 2 drives.  

See the adapter here if it helps:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186032

 

That Sata-to-IDE adapter is not compatible with unRAID.

 

In the link you posted, if you read the reviews by people using Linux, you'll see they report problems:

"Works some of the time; when it works, it's great. (I'm running Linux.)...

...DO NOT USE IT on a server where you need it to run flawlessly."

 

Lucky for you, you didn't waste too much money. That thing cost you like $10 or so. Could have been worse.   

 

 

Yes, I read the reviews.  Reading carefully it seems those who can't make it work are those who don't connect it correctly (on Windows or Linux).  The instruction booklet that came with it is the absolute worst and most confusing I have ever seen.  It's very easy to interpret the instructions wrong because of the language used.

 

One review said "Pros: Inexpensive, works great on my Ubuntu system."

 

If someone can help I'll try to access the drive, maybe format it even, from the console.

 

Thanks

If someone can help I'll try to access the drive, maybe format it even, from the console.

 

It's not about formatting it.  The parity disk has no 'format'.

It's just that unRAID is unable to use that disk:

Jan 23 13:37:21 Queeg kernel: hda: 7831152 sectors (4009 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=7769/16/63

Jan 23 13:37:23 Queeg kernel: md: import disk0: lock_rdev error: -16

Jan 23 13:37:23 Queeg kernel: md: disk0 removed

 

That adapter is reporting the disk as a 4GB disk.

 

 

It took me a little while to figure out that the 4GB drive in the syslog is referring to the flash disk I'm booting Unraid from instead of a usb drive.

 

So it looks like the other drive isn't showing up at all.

One of the newegg reviews said:

Other Thoughts: If you are using this for EIDE device to SATA controller, regardless of what device you are using, be sure to put a jumper on the "CS" pair of pins on the device, not "MA" or "SL". ONLY the "CS" pins should be jumpered.

 

Power has to be applied to the dongle as well as the device to which it is attached.

Did you attach power to the adapter?   

Well, I fiddled with it some more and the drive showed up.  So I set it as parity drive and started up the array and it started to build the parity drive.  But then some block errors began showing up in the syslog and it didn't go any further.  I rebooted a couple of times and tried again with same result.  Not comforting.

 

So I decided to scrap the ide-to-sata adapter in favor of replacing my 2 port sata pci adapter with a 4 port sata pci adapter.  I checked the hardware list and this one is supported so I ordered it. 

 

Referenced here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4336.0

The card I ordered:  http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2667&seq=1&format=2