My experience with a GA-EP45-DS3L Install

[ibnub]

I recently upgraded MB's, mostly for more and faster SATA capacity.  During the upgrade, no matter what I did I could not get the new MB to consistently boot with my fairly new Lexar USB flash drive.  It would sometimes work but mostly either not enumerate properly (and not show up in the hard drive list in the BIOS) or simply fail at various stages of the boot or startup processes or during use.  Inconsistent problems are always the worst to deal with.  After 3 long nights of on again/off again grief, I copied my production image onto my test USB drive and all of a sudden the problem was gone and the board is functioning as hoped, with no problems.  Tom I will be emailing you for a new key to a replacement drive!

 

Lessons to pass along:

 

- Never underestimate the inconsistency of USB support and device support support between MB's. 

 

- Never underestimate the value of licensing a second key for testing or problem isolation, especially when making changes. This is stock advice for experienced technicians but not always in the minds of users looking for a turnkey storage appliance.  The reality is that you will want to exploit the great extensibility of unRAID for a variety of performance, compatibility, capacity, maintenance and other reasons over the life of your system and make changes, so be prepared and ensure you have good test capability. 

 

- And last but not least, and as indicated a number of times on the Wiki and in the support docs, be sure to buy good quality flash drives, but always be mindful that even the better ones can fail!

 

 

 

[poofyhairguy]

Few questions (as I have a 43 version of this that is sure to get used in Unraid once its done being useful as a hackintosh):

 

-Any HPA problems?

 

-Any certain bios settings?

 

-Any errors of any sort?

[ibnub]

This board does pop up in the hardware compatibility listing which I had checked before purchasing it used so I was not expecting any unpleasant surprises. 

 

Other than the flash drive, no problems.

 

Just the usual in the BIOS settings like disabling a unused resources.

 

I am satisfied with the results.

 

 

[Rajahal]

Can you post a syslog?  You may have HPA and not know about it unless you specifically look for it.

[ibnub]

Thanks Rajahal.  I did indeed find that the bios inserted HPA on my working flash drive. Fortunately no other drives appear impacted according to the system log.

 

My original flash drive is still definitely a problem as it is now often not enumerating properly in other computers as well.  I could not keep it running long enough to see whether an HPA was installed on it, but it is of no importance anymore. 

 

If I understand correctly, I have to get a different BIOS onto the board in order to be able to choose to disable this function as there is currently no option in the advanced settings to do this.  I plan to do that, disable the copy to hard drive and remove the HPA from the flash drive.

 

Hopefully that will do it.

[harry3001]

ibnub - did you ever get around to flashing the bios? is there an option to disable the hpa thing?

i have the same board but only realised that i had HPA on two of my drives, going to try flashing the bios later...

[harry3001]

i'll reply to myself incase it helps anyone else - flashed the bios to the latest version, HPA is on by default... sigh, guess it's time to get a new MB.

[Superorb]

i'll reply to myself incase it helps anyone else - flashed the bios to the latest version, HPA is on by default... sigh, guess it's time to get a new MB.

 

The same is true for my GA-P35-DS3L that I was planning to use and ended up going elsewhere. Gigabyte is such a disappointment with this HPA stuff.