Hello,

I am a newbie so please take it easy!

I am currently testing unraid with a D865GLC motherboard and my machine keeps rebooting after several minutes.

I have reformatted the usb stick twice now and still have the same problem. There are no add ons currently on the system and I am at a loss. I tried to tail the syslog, but nothing useful is writing. I have attached a screen shot from my phone, sorry for the quality.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks!

 

Joe

Almost al kernel reboots are due to hardware issues, usually memory problems.

 

Have you run memtest on your server yet? 

Do you have the memory voltage, timing, and clock speed set for your specific brand/model memory strips?

Most BIOS attempt to set it for you. Some get it right, some get it wrong.  If you leave it on "auto" you take your risks.

 

Joe L.

PS. You've in good company with your phone's picture.  I did it myself once long ago to help Tom find an elusive bug.

 

 

Ah, we had another one of these Kernel problems with another unRAID member. It seems they were experiencing issues with their mobo, as they had already replaced the RAM module(s), with no success, but occurred when they did a parity check only. The RAM is far easier to test and diagnose . Good Luck!

I think it was mine or at least my original attempt at using some old equipment went that way.  The MB died and tried to take my HD with it. 

 

Rebooting means power problems.  Either the power supply is not up to the job or the MB has capacitor weakness causing low voltage problems.  How many hard drives are you using?  Mine was ok with 2 but the 3rd set up as a parity drive was too much for it.  Since then I have begun to understand why unRAID needs very reliable power.  It's happy with little ram and cpu but really needs great power supply support.

Interesting stuff, I just have this very same issue today. I have an Intel D865GBF, the CPU Fan was dying, so I replaced it with a new fan.

 

Now it's stuck in a boot loop, it boots great, bios see's everything.

Reads the USB Stick, bzimage loads, OK, and then it reboots.

 

It's stuck in a boot loop. So maybe I will try to disconnect some other fans. I also just bought a 1TB Green drive to replace an older drive, maybe that will free up some power.

 

I hope it's just a power problem, because my system ran solid for 2months.

 

It actually reboots before any of those syslog messages appear. Right after the bzimage ...... Ready! <reboot>

 

Edit: Nope, unplugged all the fans, still stuck in a boot loop. Now I'm running mem-test to see if the ram is bad or something. I double checked every cable was seated, power connectors seated, and that the ram was seated.

 

Edit2: Nope, mem-test passed with flying colours. I'm going to plug a 2nd PSU in, and feed half the drives from that and see if that helps at all.

 

Edit3: Nope, 2nd PSU powering 4 drives, still rebooting, I guess I'll try the new 4.5.3 release and see if it makes any difference.

 

Edit4: My bzimage was corrupted. I discovered this when upgrading to 4.5.3, when I tried to copy over the bzimage file, it couldn't access the file. Chkdsk fixed it, updated to 4.5.3, now it hangs on kernel_thread_helper, same as OP! At least we have the same problem, very similar motherboard.

 

Edit5: Ok, so I reverted to 4.5 (dec release), no change. Moved power from PSU1 & PSU2 to a kitchen plug (direct outlet to panel), no change.

 

I couldn't find the "parity check only" setting in mem-test86.

 

 

What a bummer. If you guys can think of anything else to try I would appreciate it!

OK So I took the plunge and formatted my USB Stick, and installed the 4.5.3 build.

 

It's running perfectly now... booted up first try.

 

Formatted: Fat 16, default allocation size, quick format, Drive Label: UNRAID

(run as administrator) syslinux -ma f:

copied unraid 4.5.3 files

 

booted, and success!

 

So now I just have to rebuild the entire configuration, and hopefully it won't try to format my drives! (I better go read up about this before I carry forward).

 

Edit: Actually, I just copied the "config" folder back on the USB drive and it restored all my settings *whew*

 

it's strange how a lot of my tgz files just go corrupt over time. I've had my bzimage, ffmpeg-0.5-i486-1alien.tgz, pms-linux-1.10.5.tgz, libXau-1.0.4-i486-1.tgz all go corrupt...

 

Edit2: Wow what a day, So after getting my system back online, the original goal was to expand the space with my new WD10EARS green drive, 1TB. I have a Sabrent SBT-SRD4 SATA Controller card, which is on the hardware compatible list. Unfortunately it's SATA-I, and the WD10EARS is SATA-II drive. Drive jumpers on the WD to limit it to 150mb/s didn't help, the system would lock up at the drive detection screen. Also you can't update the firmware on the SBT-SRD4 with the Sillicon Image bios update, says it doesn't find any cards.

 

So I just bought a Promise 300-TX4 PCI card. BAM worked first try. I was surprised to find out how old this card is, mfg in 2004, and still selling for $80.

 

Lesson Learned: I need to buy the "Locking SATA Cables", because after all the messing around, some of the cables became unseated by wiggling just a tiny bit.

Also, make a backup of your USB Stick, files go corrupted for unknown reasons (may-be my USB, Motherboard, or OS causing it, who knows).

 

(I'm just adding all this info so that people can search the forum and find this stuff out if needed)

I came home today and found my unraid server powered off. No idea how that happened. Booted it up and it was stuck on boot, hung up on kernel_thread_helper, same as before.

 

I deleted the bzimage and bzroot, re-copied the files to the USB stick, and now it's all working fine again!

I came home today and found my unraid server powered off. No idea how that happened. Booted it up and it was stuck on boot, hung up on kernel_thread_helper, same as before.

 

I deleted the bzimage and bzroot, re-copied the files to the USB stick, and now it's all working fine again!

From everything you are describing you might want to get a different USB flash drive.  It sounds as if that one is only going to give you problems.

 

I've never had to re-load anything on my Sandisk USB flash drive in over 4 1/2 years.  Never had a file go "corrupted" Only issue I've ever had was to fill it with too many back copies of bzroot and bzimage and find I had no room for another package.tgz file.  (I had about 10 older unRAID versions when I started to run out of room)  Needless to say, I've got a lot of "package.tgz files" taking up a lot of space too and an older 1Gig flash drive.

 

Joe L.

 

Two things I learned have helped me greatly. 

 

First, use locking cables but ALSO make sure that the latch is working on EACH drive.  I had one drive in which the latching mechanism had been stripped (maybe from me pulling before unlatching some time in the past) and that drive continually got corrupted.  For that one I used a little hot glue to anchor the cable. 

 

Second, I had troubles with some rebooting or freezing of unRAID.  I moved the flash drive to the back of the machine onto one of the motherboard usb connectors and the trouble completely went away.  I think the front usb connectors on my case aren't solid enough.  unRAID writes to the flash drive and it has to be a solid connection.

I came home today and found my unraid server powered off. No idea how that happened. Booted it up and it was stuck on boot, hung up on kernel_thread_helper, same as before.

 

I deleted the bzimage and bzroot, re-copied the files to the USB stick, and now it's all working fine again!

From everything you are describing you might want to get a different USB flash drive.  It sounds as if that one is only going to give you problems.

 

I've never had to re-load anything on my Sandisk USB flash drive in over 4 1/2 years.  Never had a file go "corrupted" Only issue I've ever had was to fill it with too many back copies of bzroot and bzimage and find I had no room for another package.tgz file.  (I had about 10 older unRAID versions when I started to run out of room)  Needless to say, I've got a lot of "package.tgz files" taking up a lot of space too and an older 1Gig flash drive.

 

Joe L.

 

 

Thanks Joe! unfortunately I didn't buy the unRAID plus with two USB flash drive option... so I guess I would have to buy the software again to change USB flash drives.

 

As an intermediate test step, I turned off USB 2.0 on the motherboard, and will see if running at USB 1.1 helps at all.

 

Two things I learned have helped me greatly. 

 

First, use locking cables but ALSO make sure that the latch is working on EACH drive.  I had one drive in which the latching mechanism had been stripped (maybe from me pulling before unlatching some time in the past) and that drive continually got corrupted.  For that one I used a little hot glue to anchor the cable. 

 

Second, I had troubles with some rebooting or freezing of unRAID.  I moved the flash drive to the back of the machine onto one of the motherboard usb connectors and the trouble completely went away.  I think the front usb connectors on my case aren't solid enough.  unRAID writes to the flash drive and it has to be a solid connection.

 

Excellent Tips! I will try the hot glue tip, that glue holds pretty well, but it's not like Gorilla Glue.

 

I've also connected my USB flash drive directly to a motherboard port, maybe the one port is bad. I will try a different port as a test.

Thanks Joe! unfortunately I didn't buy the unRAID plus with two USB flash drive option... so I guess I would have to buy the software again to change USB flash drives.

See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1898

Thanks Joe! unfortunately I didn't buy the unRAID plus with two USB flash drive option... so I guess I would have to buy the software again to change USB flash drives.

See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1898

 

Excellent! Thanks, I did get a new drive, and was able to get a new key. Everything is up and running great now.

 

I've also decided to stop running PS3MediaServer as it continuously writes a debug.log file onto the drive (Maybe that was what killed my flashdrive)