April 22, 201016 yr Author OK I need some help. After that last post I got another parity disk failure. I check the SMART log and the reallocated sectors now says 8 (previously was 2). I shut everything down and replace the parity drive with a new WD Green drive (WD10EARS) making sure I put a jumper on pins 7-8 per other posts here. I fire up the system and during boot I get a whole bunch of COMRESET messages (never seen these at boot up before). Finally it boots and I assign the new drive to the parity slot via the web interface. It takes FOREVER to respond but when it finally did the parity drive was disabled (I think there was a message that said something like DSK_DSBL_NP) but don't take my word on that - not important right now - read on... After opening it back up again and making sure all the cables were reset I tried booting again. This is where I am now: - press the power button - get the BIOS splash screen - get the IRQ screen - get a black screen - get the BIOS splash screen ...round and round. It never even tries to boot. No messages about a missing keyboard or memory or no boot device or anything like that, just round and round and round. Do I have a bad mobo? a bad flash drive? any ideas? Please help.
April 22, 201016 yr Author I guess I was thinking the same thing because when the notification email came in I was looking at the hardware compatibility page trying to find another socket-939 board without the NForce4 controller. Anyone else concur with the bad mobo diagnosis? Anyone have a suggestion on a mobo (prefer socket-939 so I can reuse my cpu)?
April 22, 201016 yr OK I need some help. After that last post I got another parity disk failure. I check the SMART log and the reallocated sectors now says 8 (previously was 2). I shut everything down and replace the parity drive with a new WD Green drive (WD10EARS) making sure I put a jumper on pins 7-8 per other posts here. I fire up the system and during boot I get a whole bunch of COMRESET messages (never seen these at boot up before). Finally it boots and I assign the new drive to the parity slot via the web interface. It takes FOREVER to respond but when it finally did the parity drive was disabled (I think there was a message that said something like DSK_DSBL_NP) but don't take my word on that - not important right now - read on... After opening it back up again and making sure all the cables were reset I tried booting again. This is where I am now: - press the power button - get the BIOS splash screen - get the IRQ screen - get a black screen - get the BIOS splash screen ...round and round. It never even tries to boot. No messages about a missing keyboard or memory or no boot device or anything like that, just round and round and round. Do I have a bad mobo? a bad flash drive? any ideas? Please help. It does not sound as if it is getting to where the flash drive is involved. You might try re-seating any cards/memory strips. Also, you might try un-plugging the new drive you just installed.
April 22, 201016 yr I guess I was thinking the same thing because when the notification email came in I was looking at the hardware compatibility page trying to find another socket-939 board without the NForce4 controller. Anyone else concur with the bad mobo diagnosis? Anyone have a suggestion on a mobo (prefer socket-939 so I can reuse my cpu)? Socket-939 was replaced by Socket AM2 more than five years ago. You'll be better off just getting some more recent mobo/cpu.
May 29, 201016 yr Author Well - it's been nearly a month since the last post so I should close the loop on this one. After all the issues above I finally decided the most recent issues were due to either the mobo or PSU. I could still get into the BIOS and the voltages from the PSU all seemed fine and hardly fluctuated at all but that wasn't under load. I rolled the dice on a new Mobo (and the required CPU & RAM since nothing new would support what I had). I wanted a new Supermicro C2SEA but they were in short supply. I couldn't find stock anywhere. Just by chance one day I found an open box at Newegg and grabbed it. I think it was only available for 10 minutes or so (less than $100 with overnight shipping). After the install, memchecks, burn-in, etc. I put back all the old drives that appeared to be giving me problems. Guess what...no problems whatsoever. And this board really screams. I get parity check speeds that are nearly double what I was getting before. It's all been running undisturbed for 2-3 weeks now and it still screams. That old used ASUS A8N SLI-Premium board was my first crack at unRAID so I really didn't know what I was missing. Now that I think back on everything I suspect that board had issues from the beginning. I get parity checks now that average in the low-mid 70's MB/s and I regularly see 90+ MB/s during the run. Right now I'm running preclear_disk.sh on a new 2 TB "green" drive and if the percentage figures are time and not progress then it's going to take around 6 hours to complete (consistently seeing 90+ MB/s). From what I've read that's pretty fast. If you don't think it's all that fast then don't say anything because I'm really happy with it right now The amazing thing to me is that through all this hardware failure, replacing disks, moving disks around / changing roles, etc. I haven't lost a single bit of data. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have done that with my old Sun Storedge array plus I have way more storage for a lot less money. Cheers to Lime-Tech and the guys on this forum that helped me out. Thanks a ton!!! ;D
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