3 hours ago, ijuarez said:

That's great that you got your data back, IMHO i start looking for a replacement MOBO, they fact that it will not let you boot off the stick and it fried 3 drives (sort of) to me its sending a signal that there's something wrong.

 

Note that it was the PSU that broke and fried the disks - the motherboard only interface with low-level signals to the disks. And it might be the USB stick or some BIOS settings instead of the motherboard hardware that makes the machine not auto-boot from the USB stick.

15 hours ago, ijuarez said:

That's great that you got your data back, IMHO i start looking for a replacement MOBO, they fact that it will not let you boot off the stick and it fried 3 drives (sort of) to me its sending a signal that there's something wrong.

 

I think it was most likely the PSU that fried the drives. I do plan on replacing the mobo and cpu soon anyway all being well.

 

EDIT:

I didn't realize pwm had responded to this.

Edited June 21, 20188 yr by T800

15 hours ago, Mat1926 said:

 

I am glad that you recovered your data, would you pls give us the link to the online store?

 

Thnx

It was Ebay, the seller is called "leetomi"

12 hours ago, pwm said:

 

Note that it was the PSU that broke and fried the disks - the motherboard only interface with low-level signals to the disks. And it might be the USB stick or some BIOS settings instead of the motherboard hardware that makes the machine not auto-boot from the USB stick.

 

It seems that the settings in the BIOS just aren't being saved. I'm gonna try updating it as they've been a few since I installed it.

1 hour ago, T800 said:

 

It seems that the settings in the BIOS just aren't being saved. I'm gonna try updating it as they've been a few since I installed it.

 

Have you verified the battery for the BIOS settings? Some motherboards have a silver-oxide button cell. And some have a supercap that never needs to be replaced - it's recharged whenever the board is powered.

 

First off: verify if the board can keep time/date if you remove power and wait an hour and reconnect power.

22 hours ago, pwm said:

 

Have you verified the battery for the BIOS settings? Some motherboards have a silver-oxide button cell. And some have a supercap that never needs to be replaced - it's recharged whenever the board is powered.

 

First off: verify if the board can keep time/date if you remove power and wait an hour and reconnect power.

 

No, I haven't. It has a button cell that I have replaced. I will try what you suggested. Thanks

The motherboard doesn't lose time when it's unplugged for a few hours.

 

Did the update, went well, still the same issue.

Edited June 25, 20188 yr by T800

Any other setting you can test to change, and then power off/on and verify if the setting is remembered?

 

If the BIOS can't maintain settings despite having a good battery, then something is broken.

23 hours ago, pwm said:

Any other setting you can test to change, and then power off/on and verify if the setting is remembered?

 

If the BIOS can't maintain settings despite having a good battery, then something is broken.

 

All the settings, in the motherboard are kept after powering off/om except the boot order. Gonna look for another motherboard. There was a direct replacement on ebay yesterday but I just missed it.

I have seen motherboards that in some situations do not like to remember boot order - possibly they don't understand the naming of some of the devices or some USB-connected drives.

 

If you can save everything but the boot order, then i'm pretty sure there isn't an electrical error with the board. It's more probable to be a bug in the BIOS.

Have you tried to reset BIOS settings to default and start over?

I have no idea why, but it works sometimes.

I tried a reset just after it happened. I've found a replacement that's coming Friday. Gonna fit that at the weekend and replace all my sata cables

Motherboard turned up. I stripped the server down, replaced the motherboard and refreshed all my cables.

When I built this 7 years ago it was my first PC build that used more than one sata port. I used so many more molex adapters than I needed too. It much tidier now.

 

Booted the server, set up the BIOS aaaannndddd the same problem is there! Gutted!

 

I thought maybe it's the USB stick? Put it in my other server and it auto booted fine.

 

I then went looking on why it won't boot via USB, I found all sorts of things to try from:
Legacy USB enabled
Quick Boot off
Disable Secure Boot (couldn't find it)
USB 3.0 off
Emulation type Forced FDD and Harddisk

Different USB ports

 

All of them weren't set. I guess it could have been something I missed when I reset it after the PSU dying.

 

Tried changing them but none of them worked.

 

I've added some images.

- As you can see the USB drive shows up when I press F8 and select it to boot.

- These are my USB settings

- This is my boot priority, it states than any device enclosed in parenthesis is disabled, which the USB drive is.

- This is a list of drives available to boot. I could have sworn I've seen the USB drive there over the last week but it's not there now. For some reason it lists many IDE drives that don't exist.

 

I'm close to giving up on this.
 

I vaguely  recall (from many years back) that there were a few motherboards, that after you installed more than 12 hard drives, would not recognize any USB drives as being boot devices...

 

Be sure that you have updated your MB BIOS to the latest version. 

 

Can you use the F8 key at bootup, select the USB drive and have the server bootup and run correctly?  

 

EDIT:  Google this:         unraid M5A78L-M mb not booting   for more insight in problems with this MB. 

Edited July 2, 20188 yr by Frank1940

I'm on the latest version. I never had a problem booting with 16 drives until the PSU debacle.

 

I will try it with the SAS and PCI cards out and see if it makes any difference.

 

I wonder if I accidentally found a workaround in the order I added everything and wiping the settings has spoilt it.

I don't understand why it says I have so many IDE drives.

 

This MB has always had boot issues.  (Did you do the google that I suggested:   unraid M5A78L-M mb not booting )  Read through those threads and see if there ever was a solution that works for you.  I believe that most people simply learned to live with it.  (I know that is what I did...)  Of course, years ago, unRAID systems often ran for months without requiring a reboot as the pace of updates was much slower.  Today with Dockers and VM's, LimeTech can not ignore security issues as was done in the past.  (Even three years ago, no one was worried about security patches to the underlaying OS.  Today, they tend to post about them within hours asking when it going to be patched.) 

 

Make sure that you have set your SATA controllers to use the ACHI mode  (not IDE) in the BIOS. You will get better performance.

Well I think I sussed it. I unplugged my SAS cables (connecting 8 of the 16 drives). Started it up and went to the BIOS. Selected boot device and order without an issue. Booted into unRAID. Shut it down, plugged SAS cables back and it and now it auto boots.