Hi all - apologies if this is the wrong place to post this.

 

I have been running an unRAID server (Free version with 2 drives - Samsung 1TB and Samsung 500GB) for the last year or two, based on a MA74GM-S2H motherboard with the dodgy HPA BIOS.  I recently upgraded this to an unRAID Pro set-up and added some 2TB WD EAR drives.  As I couldn't upgrade my motherboard BIOS to one that didn't have HPA (too old a board) I also upgraded to an Asus motherboard with a cleaner BIOS.

 

All went well - but I checked all my drives for HPA according to a thread here - and surprise surprise, both hard drives previously used with the Gigabyte board showed up with HPA.  I used the hparm -p suggested solution in a thread here to resize the drives and remove the HPA stuff.  However I think I must have got the sizes wrong - as when I did my first parity check (I hadn't previously been running with a parity drive) I got 200+ (same number on both) errors on both Samsung drives.  I'm not an expert - but I have a feeling I got the hdparm values wrong and the drives and unRaid or the OS are  expecting the drives to be bigger than they really are (because I've told it they are?)?

 

Advice please?  I can backup the content on the two drives and reformat if that would help?

 

Syslog is attached (have only posted the first few errors to keep the size down).

Syslog2.txt

This is what I would recommend, having gone through this before:

 

Move the data and remove the drives from the machine.

 

The easiest way to do this is to "upgrade the drive" and let the parity drive replace the contents.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Replacing_a_Data_Drive

 

Another option is to move the data to another drive and zero the drive - this will maintain parity.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2591.msg20919#msg20919

 

The third option is to move the data, remove the drive and then recalculate parity.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Restore_array_configuration_.28pre-unRAID_4.5.4.2C_the_Restore_button.2C_on_subsequent_versions.2C_the_.22initconfig.22_command.29

 

After the drive has been removed, use Seatools (it will work on all brands of drives) to remove the HPA. I tried all of the  recommended methods, but Seatools was the only method I had success with.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=SeaTools&vgnextoid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Thanks ohlwiler.

 

I should be able to back up the contents of the two drives to other discs in the array - as I have some spare capacity.  I don't NEED my parity drive yet as the rest of the content is backed up elsewhere still.

 

Does Seatools work on non-Seagate drives OK?  I'm guessing it does as you've suggested I use it!