I had six drives up & running in my unRAID server (3.1 beta 2) - - four SATA drvies connected to a Promise controller, two PATA drives connected to the mb, and one empty Promise controller.  Everything was running great.

 

Then I decided to add two new SATA drives to the second Promise controller.  The steps in order:

 

1.  Gracefully shut unRAID down (using my browser).

2.  Added the drives to the trays.

3.  Physically started the server back up.

4.  Launched my browser, reconnected to //tower and stopped the array.

5.  Went to the devices tab and added the two new drives.

6.  Went back to the main tab and everything looks like it should...all the original drives are green, the two new drives show up as blue, and the array was stopped.

7.  I then clicked on the "are you sure" button and asked unRAID to start (i.e., format the new drives).

 

That's when things just stopped.  The interface hung, the drive lights on existing 4-in-3 caddie went red (oddly, the 4-in-3 caddie with the new drives stayed green) and I can no longer get to any of the drives via Network Neighborhood.  I can still, however, log onto the box.

 

What, if anything, should I do?

Well...I punched the button on my KVM to log onto my unRAID server and found that it too was locked up.  So I powered down each SATA drive (the caddie has buttons for this) and then rebooted the machine.

 

The good news is that it's responsive again, and I'm back to where I started (see below).  So...what should I do differently this time?

 

Update #2...

 

I gracefully powered down the box, rechecked all the connectors, fired the box back up, checked the "are you sure" box again...took a deep breath...and clicked start.

 

This time, for reasons unexplained, the system appears to have responded normally and is clearing the new drives (see below).

 

More later...

Final update...

 

Well, unRAID cleared, reformatted and brought the new disks on line.  Not sure which gremlin got into the system, but everything looks okay now.

 

Bill