I am having an issue when I have to restart the system.  This is usually after I shut the system down due to impending thunderstorms, but has also happened when we loose power and the battery backup does not last long enough. The system has an Asus MB with 7 internal sata and 2 promise cards each having 4 ports and 15 identical WD 1TB drives, with 1 being the parity.  It usually looses 8 to 10 drives.  I have to go to Devices and re-select them from the drop down and it's up.  The problem is when I am not around, the other non-technical members of the house could not be expected to remember how, so  I get a call saying the system is "not working".  Once before I posted this and was told to upgrade from the 4.2 to the 4.3.3 AND slow down the boot up by turning on the actual memory test to give the system time to catch up with which sata are board vs built in mother board connections.  But I still have the problem.  Any suggestions. 

 

I would also like to have the system do the drives in physical order.  When it starts up, the lights checking the drives (or what ever it is doing) seem very random, instead of starting at drive 1 then 2, 3, 4, etc.  I have the first 5 drives connected to the first 5 MB ports, then the next 5 with the last 2 MB port and the first Promise card, etc.  Is there a way to force it to the physical order?

I am having an issue when I have to restart the system.  This is usually after I shut the system down due to impending thunderstorms, but has also happened when we loose power and the battery backup does not last long enough. The system has an Asus MB with 7 internal sata and 2 promise cards each having 4 ports and 15 identical WD 1TB drives, with 1 being the parity.  It usually looses 8 to 10 drives.  I have to go to Devices and re-select them from the drop down and it's up.  The problem is when I am not around, the other non-technical members of the house could not be expected to remember how, so  I get a call saying the system is "not working".  Once before I posted this and was told to upgrade from the 4.2 to the 4.3.3 AND slow down the boot up by turning on the actual memory test to give the system time to catch up with which sata are board vs built in mother board connections.  But I still have the problem.  Any suggestions. 

 

I would also like to have the system do the drives in physical order.  When it starts up, the lights checking the drives (or what ever it is doing) seem very random, instead of starting at drive 1 then 2, 3, 4, etc.  I have the first 5 drives connected to the first 5 MB ports, then the next 5 with the last 2 MB port and the first Promise card, etc.  Is there a way to force it to the physical order?

 

Don't confuse the physical order in which drives are powered up with the order in which drives are assigned.  Although there are controllers that allow you to stagger the drive spin-ups, this is pretty rare in today's world.  As long as your PSU is powerful enough to handle spinning all of your drives at the same time, you are fine from this perspective.  If you are finding some of your drives MISSING after a reboot (not able to be assigned from the devices page because they are not in the dropdown box), you may be having a problem like this.  On my system I had to disable quick boot because on a hard boot my system would be ready to go before my drives were all powered up.  After disabling quick boot I could boot reliably.

 

What may be happening is that your BIOS is assigning drives in a different order.  This was not uncommon with P4 and earlier motherboards.  I have not heard of this happening with Core2 and other more recent boards.  When the drives connect in different orders, sometimes unRAID, which uses some interesting ways of identifying drives, may have difficulty correctly associating the drives to your unRAID slots.

 

The other thing that may be happening is that your USB drive may be going bad.  Every time you update your drive configurations, unRAID writes a small file into your config directory.  A flashdisk can only handle so many writes to a single spot on the disk.  If the file is not written correctly, it could cause problems with the array configuration on subsequent reboots.

 

I'd suggest capturing a syslog.  Then reboot and capture another syslog in which all the drives are not recognized / assigned to slots correctly.  Post these two consecutive syslogs.  The expert logreaders here can likely tell you what is happening in your system.

 

BTW - tip for people related to their USB disks.  Todays USB drives are enormous compared to what unRAID needs. I recommend NEVER deleting files from it.  Every time a new version of unRAID comes up, just rename the old versions and add the new.  Periodically copy the config folder, and rename the old one to something like config.backup.x and rename the new one "config".  Not only does this leave you backups in case you might ever need them, it will also cause you to use different places on the your flashdrive instead of reading and writing to the exact same spots over and over and over and over and ... again.

The log is too large to post as a message.  I am not sure how to post it as a attachment or whatever.

You can try posting to http://pastebin.com/ or zipping the syslog and attaching the zip file.