MrGrumpie Posted October 24, 2010 Share Posted October 24, 2010 Hi all Just finished my server build last night, and setup the array. I formatted the drives, started the service and it's now completed with no errors, and it says parity is valid. Is that it? Am I ready to roll? I've heard pre-clear mentioned many times, can someone explain this to me please? Thanks Matt Link to comment
MrGrumpie Posted October 24, 2010 Author Share Posted October 24, 2010 Ugh, my jubilence is somewhat shortlived Just shut the server down, inserted a couple more HDDs, rebooted and now I get nothing when I type //tower into my browser, the share I set up is inaccessible, there's nothing showing for tower in network places, and after logging in to my router....it's not showing as connected! I connected the unraid server directly to a monitor, but I'm not getting the usual unraid options of unraid os or memcheck or whatever the option is. Once it's got past the mobo boot screen I'm left with a black screen and a flashing white cursor, but that's it. Any ideas? I'm a little stumped! Link to comment
gfjardim Posted October 24, 2010 Share Posted October 24, 2010 Maybe one of your new drives have a boot sector, or the motherboard is trying to boot via network. You just have to re-setup the boot order on the BIOS. Link to comment
MrGrumpie Posted October 24, 2010 Author Share Posted October 24, 2010 That was exactly it, thanks Every time I add a drive the bios resets to boot from HDD rather than the usb drive Can anyone explain to me in layman's terms how I go about running a pre-clear script? I'm still a little confused as I thought this is what happens when the array is built. I've added 3 x 2TB HDDs today and I'm up to 86% "clearing", so not sure why a separate pre-clear needs to be done? Link to comment
Joe L. Posted October 24, 2010 Share Posted October 24, 2010 I've added 3 x 2TB HDDs today and I'm up to 86% "clearing", so not sure why a separate pre-clear needs to be done? Easy... your array has been off-line for a number of hours now while it clears the new drives. You could eliminate that off-line time and be able to use your server for all but a few minutes if you had added drives that had been pre-cleared. If you don't need your server online, it really does not matter. In my house it would be missed if it was off-line for a number of hours, so the pre-clearing is a very necessary step. Joe L. Link to comment
MrGrumpie Posted October 24, 2010 Author Share Posted October 24, 2010 Thanks for the explanation I've got my NAS running in parallel so it's not essential to have the array online. Everything's just pre-cleared (5 x 2TB data and 1 x 2TB parity, giving me 9.09TB free space), and I've just started a parity check on the entire array which should be complete by tomorrow morning - peaking at 100mbps p/s I'm running a mix of Seagate LP 2TB and Samsung F3 2TBs so far...but I need to do the firmware upgrade on the Seagates before I start transferring media and stress testing. Really enjoying the unRAID process though, already I feel more comfortable over the traditional raid setup. The server is running a bit loud even though I've got all the fans on low, but the HDDs are running nice and cool - 24-26 degrees, and they peak at 31 degrees Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted October 25, 2010 Share Posted October 25, 2010 I think I went into my BIOS and set the 1st, 2nd and 3rd boot order as USB, USB, USB or something like that. I can swap drives in and out without it acting up. Of course, this is motherboard dependant so you might not have any way around it. Also, congrats on the working system. unRAID is a fairly simple thing (it stores files) but it's simple and does the job very well. Peter Link to comment
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