I thought I was doing very well until today.  My unraid system went off the air.  I looked at unmenu which was still running and tried to get to the unraid menu and got back a page that said "e  0" and nothing else. Every choice to change pages did the same thing.  I rebooted the system and it came up with "boot error".  I moved the flash drive to a windows machine and it was blank!!!  Things are not very happy at my house right now. I just got an XBMC on an Asrock Ion fully functional, have my Dune Player working the way I want it, now this crops up Grrrrrr!!!

 

I restored the flash from back ups I made with no success.  I tied the flash drive in another machine and also got boot error.  I took a blank flash drive, prepped it properly (format and syslinux) and placed a downloaded copy of 4.5.4 on the flash and tried it.  It never got to the point of booting unraid, but rather stalled on "checking vmi pool data . . . .  I put the flash drive in another machine and it came up to the unraid boot screen and started to boot unraid when I stopped it. That tells me I can build a valid unraid flash drive for a three drive array

 

I believe I have at least two problems.

 

1) I think something on my unraid system is corrupting the flash drives or the USB system is malfunctioning.  I have a USB flash storage unit installed inside the case and will remove that to see if it is perhaps loading down the USB due to a malfunction.

 

2) I need to rebuild the registered flash drives that I received from limetech.  I do have backups of each of them (neither of them are working at this time giving "boot error" in any machine they are placed into.  I assume if I reformat the drives, run syslinux on them and then reload a saved configuration (I have different ones saved for each of the two registered drives) I will be able to once again boot.  Hopefully the Hard drives are okay!!   

 

Could someone confirm that the approach I plan to take is correct, in particular what I need to do to rebuild the two registered flash drives?

 

TIA

Step 1.  Do a memory test.  It is as likely as any to be the problem.

 

Joe L.

Good thought and I will do That!!

 

I just got it all squared away.  You know how impatient I am.  I rebuilt the registered flash drive from my most recent backup copy -1. I did what I said I would do in post 1 (reformat, run syslinux, copy over a backup.  The system booted with no issue just as it has before. I spot checked the data drives and they appear to be okay. Unmenu is running as it should (I expected no less considering the authorship).  

 

The system did decide however to do a parity check which is proceeding.  I guess that will take a while (I parity, 4 active storage in the array, 1 cleared and checked drive not in the array) all drives being 2TB in size.  I am curious why it decided to do the parity check any hints?  I do not have the monthly parity check package installed yet.

 

I suspect the following:  Last night we had one of our usual FL summer storms.  My home has good surge protection and lighting protection but nothing is perfect. It is possible that there was some electrical noise pick up and the USB bus is sensitive to that type of issue. Never be able to prove it, but it is a comforting thought, to me at least.

 

Getting back to the memory issue, I will run the test, but my experience with memory chips has always been very positive.  There always is a first time!!

 

I am seeing on the unraid page the following lines being reported as minor issues:

 

Jun 1 21:02:58 Tower ata_id[6833]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:48'

Jun 1 21:02:58 Tower ata_id[6852]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:48'

Jun 1 21:04:06 Tower ata_id[7311]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:48'

Jun 1 21:04:06 Tower ata_id[7326]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:48'

 

I haven't got a clue as to what this means and would appreciate enlightenment as always.

If you did not stop the array cleanly before powering down, it will perform a full parity check upon reboot.

 

Sounds quite normal to me.

 

Joe L.

What about the "minor issue" messages?  I assume they are minor issues but would appreciate any light you could shed.

 

If I remember correctly you also use XBMC.  That is quite a piece of work!  I have just started with it on a small Asrock ion 330 box that almost looks as it was specifically designed to run XBMC.

What about the "minor issue" messages?  I assume they are minor issues but would appreciate any light you could shed.

The driver for that SATA controller does not support the HDIO_GET_IDENTITY ioctl command.  Perhaps it will in some future version (once it gets more mature)

 

Just ignore the messages in the syslog, those are nothing to worry about.

If I remember correctly you also use XBMC.  That is quite a piece of work!  I have just started with it on a small Asrock ion 330 box that almost looks as it was specifically designed to run XBMC.

Mine is a Acer Revo 1600 (Ion 220 CPU).  Works fine booting from a flash drive (linux 9.11 version).  I also have the windows version of XBMC installed on both my Vista laptop and on one of the PCs in the theater running XP Professional. (That HTPC is not normally used on the projector, but was assembled for that purpose. It just never was put into place. It is a 3.4Ghz P4.  XBMC seems to work fine on it.  It is much newer than the older HTPC.  ) 

 

The much older HTPC in the theater is a PCI only, 1.2Gig Tualatin P3.  I really hate to replace it, as it works well and is integrated into the room lighting  I use zoom-player and girder to monitor it and lower the room lights when I press "Play" and raise them when I press "Pause" or "Stop"

 

I'm not yet sure if XBMC has the hooks I need to control the room lights in the same manner.  I use XBMC in the Den where a Acer Revo 1600 replaced the old MG-35 media player that was originally used there.  I'm still learning its limitations and strengths.  I love some of the skins available to customize it.  It has a LOT to offer.

 

Joe L.

Unraid continues to amaze me.  I finished watching TV for the evening and decided I would see what Unraid was doing.  I was going to look at unmenu to see if it told me anything but I had my email system open and unraid was sending me messages.  I was getting hourly progres reports from resync on the status of the parity check.  Amazing I don't ever recall asking it to do that!  Below I have copied the last message it sent:

 

Subject:unRaid Resync Notification

Status update for unRAID  Tower

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Status: The unRaid array is resync/rebuilding parity.

 

Parity CHECK/RESYNC in progress,  54.9% complete,  est. finish in 142.5 minutes. Speed: 102827 kb/s.

Server Name: Tower

Server IP: 192.168.1.209

Date: Tue Jun  1 23:47:09 EDT 2010

Filesystem          1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda1              1953776    161680  1792096  9% /boot

/dev/sdb1              7837760      8864  7828896  1% /mnt/scratch

/dev/md3            1953454928 210768944 1742685984  11% /mnt/disk3

/dev/md1            1953454928 1686276024 267178904  87% /mnt/disk1

/dev/md2            1953454928 1878188900  75266028  97% /mnt/disk2

/dev/md4            1953454928 115546344 1837908584  6% /mnt/disk4

shfs                7813819712 3890780212 3923039500  50% /mnt/user

 

 

It is reporting progress and I can only assume that it would also tell me if it had to adjust parity at any time.

 

My Home Theater which has been a work in progress, a hobby, for the last 10 or so years is what I spend a lot of time on.  When I started I decided I would build my own control system and it has worked out nicely.  The integrated librarian is easy to change and play with and is based on the DVD Profiler application where I manage all my DVD's. CD's and BR disks. I use the exported xml profile file and cover art collection to drive the Theaters Librarian. The librarian displays the library context in a text based system sorted by title or age of item. select a title and you can either play it or display everything known about it in a nice graphical display. It is what I like and has met my needs.

 

The house has a separate automation controller but all the PC's in the house are on the same LAN and talk to each other over TCPIP.  For example when a call comes in the Home Automation system which monitors the phone lines tells the theater as well as announcing it over all of the in wall touch screens and the house's audio messaging system. The theater PC based on who has called can pause the theater no matter what the source is so I can choose to answer the call.  When done I just hit the play button on the wi-fi remote.  The Theater can tell (and it does) the Home Automation  PC to dim/brighten the lights, adjust the Theaters HVAC settings and do other things I have programmed. The theaters control PC controls XBMC using XBMC's HTTP API.  I have just started to develop that code, but can currently select a movie from the integrated librarian, have XBMC play it, stop it, pause it etc. the same capability exists for the Dune player but I am doing some Alpha testing for them and can not discuss it to any great extent.  As I stated elsewhere the Dune player is the closest thing I have seen to a Media player appliance.  That is probably because the people who developed it do a lot of kiosk systems.

 

My next big project will probably be to replace the Pronto's with an iPAD.  My Pronto friends won't like it but I will enjoy doing it and the wow factor should be amazing!

 

With Unraid the house now has the storage base it always needed. I am sure that as long as I don't touch it it will just keep on ticking.

 

Thanks again for all the help you have provided