Acer easyStore H340: Dont get your hopes up

[delirial]

Hi everyone,

 

I'd recently seen a couple of posts regarding the Acer easyStore H340 and nobody seemed to have tested with UnRAID (other than some guy saying it booted in the ubuntu forums). The veredict? While a very nice box, it does not seem suitable for UnRAID.

 

So, what's the problem? After removing the original drive that came with it, I installed my 2x Caviar Green 2TB HDDs. It booted just fine. Several restarts and all that. Eventually, I setup the RAID. It formatted the disks and built parity. After building parity I have been unable to boot from the flash unless I remove the disks. Removing the disks, and inserting right after I see the flash drive light up for the first time works, but that is just a hindrance. I also thought UnRAID allowed for hot-swaping, so I tried to insert the HDD after UnRAID had booted. That did not work.

 

I also tried blindly going into the BIOS and changing the boot order. But as it turns out, you can't get into the BIOS unless you place a jumper in the mobo. I was unwilling to void the warranty at this point because I'm planning to return it.

 

Using the custom VGA cable that's compatible with it should be OK, but that would increase the cost of the box by 60$-80$, and is IMHO not worth it. Plus you'd be, again, voiding the warranty.

 

The box looks sexy. But I can't get it to work without opening it up. I'll go back to the store and exchange it for some AMD motherboard and use spare parts to build my box.

 

regards

[prostuff1]

I also thought UnRAID allowed for hot-swaping, so I tried to insert the HDD after UnRAID had booted. That did not work.

 

Just in case anyone else finds this thread i wanted to clear up that unRAID DOES NOT support hot-swapping.  It never has to this point, and if tried it could completely screw something up.

[lionelhutz]

It is a pretty box but it seems the boot sequence is HDD then USB so that would require a bios change.

 

The hot swap seems to be hardware dependent looking here so I wouldn't outright say not supported. unRAID isn't written to support hot swap but with the right hardware you could do it. Still, you can' hot swap array disks when the array is started. You could pull one and get a missing disk but you can't replace it without a stop and start.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4936.msg45523#msg45523

 

Peter

 

[WeeboTech]

It is a pretty box but it seems the boot sequence is HDD then USB so that would require a bios change.

 

You can probably install grub or grub4dos onto the first hard drive (or all).

grub4dos can find a menu.lst file which will then select where to load bzroot/bzimage.

 

Not the best way to go, but it's feasible.

 

grub4dos can read reiserfs files so if you have a boot directory on the disk, it can find what's needed.

grub requires a stage1_5 file which may make it harder to work with.

 

[Rajahal]

Some mobos also allow you to set a USB drive in 'HDD Emulation mode' or similar, which would make the mobo think it is a regular HDD.  Make it the first boot drive, and it should work.

 

No idea if that will work with the Acer easyStore H340, though.

[delirial]

Some mobos also allow you to set a USB drive in 'HDD Emulation mode' or similar, which would make the mobo think it is a regular HDD.  Make it the first boot drive, and it should work.

 

No idea if that will work with the Acer easyStore H340, though.

 

The problem with this box is precisely that you can't access the BIOS without voiding the warranty. Some guys are running FreeNAS on it, but they had to open the server, put in a jumper, and a special cable to get video.

 

Some reports say if you remove the jumper from the board, the box will revert to booting from the HDD.

 

Good news is I returned it to the store and got myself the components I was missing for a server, plus a UPS, for 50$ than I paid for the Easystore.