Disk in parity slot is not biggest

[gooner_47]

I have previously had the array running successfully with this same drive as parity. I'm not sure what's changed to make this message now appear and be unable to start the array with this parity drive?

[itimpi]

What motherboard do you have?    Someone earlier today had exactly the same symptom and it was caused by their motherboard’s BIOS creating an HPA area on the drive (and thus effectively shrinking it).

[gooner_47]

It’s a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4

[gooner_47]

I’ve found the other thread, thanks for the heads up - will try following that and see how I go

[gooner_47]

Is anyone able to confirm, based on these diagnostics, that the HPA area is indeed the problem?

 

 

tower-diagnostics-20190415-2020.zip

[itimpi]

The diagnostics definitely show that an HPA is detected.

 

i also note that you are getting errors relating to a floppy drive!   Do you actually have floppy drive?    If not you might want to disable it in the BIOS settings.

[gooner_47]

Ok thanks. I don’t have a floppy drive! Is it possible that the same issue that has caused the BIOS to create the HPA area (as I understand it caused by the CMOS battery dying and the BIOS settings reverting) has also enabled a default setting making the BIOS think a floppy drive is still connected? If so I’ll replace the CMOS and get back into the BIOS to fix things up.

[Squid]

7 hours ago, gooner_47 said:

Ok thanks. I don’t have a floppy drive! Is it possible that the same issue that has caused the BIOS to create the HPA area (as I understand it caused by the CMOS battery dying and the BIOS settings reverting) has also enabled a default setting making the BIOS think a floppy drive is still connected? If so I’ll replace the CMOS and get back into the BIOS to fix things up.

Anecdotally (or at least my experience), HPA's get created when the system attempts to boot via a hard drive.  The BIOS will then toss an HPA partition on some drive.  However, if it finds an HPA already existing on a drive, then it will not create another one.  Since I tend to use Gigabyte BIOS's also, I leave whatever HPA partition exists on any given drive.  It's only a problem if its on the Parity drive, and if one exists on a data drive, then it shouldn't ever create another one.

[gooner_47]

3 hours ago, Squid said:

It's only a problem if its on the Parity drive

It sounds like if the BIOS was reset, the boot order may have been lost and it indeed tried to boot from the parity drive first, rather than the unraid USB drive. What's the best way to remove the HPA from the parity drive?