Hi everyone,

 

Last week my server shut down unexpectedly and I've been working on fixing it; after bringing it back up I'm seeing all of the disks as missing except for the boot device.

 

I have a feeling it may be something with the SAS HBA, but it's been a while since I've done any work on this server. If anyone has any ideas / tips to try to get the OS to recognize the drives again it'd be greatly appreciated.

 

Attached is the diagnostics.

 

Regards,

Ezro

tower-diagnostics-20190806-1738.zip

5 hours ago, Ezro said:

I have a feeling it may be something with the SAS HBA

It does look like that is the problem, are the disks detected by the HBA bios during boot?

18 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

It does look like that is the problem, are the disks detected by the HBA bios during boot?

It doesn't look like it. I tried switching the port that the HBA card is plugged into and that also didn't work.

 

I'm not sure if the power outage possibly fried the card itself or if it's my motherboard's ports. It'd be weird if an unused port was fried out, though, so I'm more inclined to believe that it's the HBA card.

 

Do you know if there's possibly a bios property that could have been switched if the bios reset?

If the disks aren't detected by the HBA bios the HBA is likely the problem, assuming they work on a different controller.

Edited August 8, 20196 yr by johnnie.black

@JorgeB I still have this issue pretty much every time I restart the server and it usually takes a bunch of reboots in order for everything to start working again. Last year I ordered an LSI SAS 9210-8i and swapped it out, but that didn't resolve the issue.

 

I currently have a Supermicro 846E1-R900B server and am not sure how to diagnose if it's something with the SAS backplane or if I happened to receive another dud HBA card.

 

Do you have any advice / steps on how I can diagnose this and hopefully fix it?

Unlikely to be the HBA if the same happens with another one, you can try connecting up to 8 disks directly to the HBA, even if it doesn't allow array start, you can see if the connected disks are detected and if yes it suggests the problem is the backplane.

A bit of a newbie question, but is there an easy way to detect how many / which drives are being detected? (Preferably by serial number)

Just boot Unraid and look at the main GUI page.

@JorgeBI ordered a replacement extender backplane (https://www.ebay.com/itm/274829421125) which is the same model as the one I replaced. After swapping it out, I've been testing it and seeing the same issue(s).

 

Sometimes I'll restart it and no SCSI devices appear in the Tools->System Devices->SCSI Devices. Sometimes a few drives appear. Sometimes almost all (but one) drive appears.

 

I haven't yet had the new backplane show all drives in the SCSI Devices pane.

 

Do you know how I can determine if maybe I'm not powering all of the drives well? Or maybe it's the cables I'm using? I'm not sure how to diagnose what's going wrong but I'm going to switch back to the original backplane to try to get all SCSI devices recognized.

Did you do this?

 

On 9/30/2021 at 6:49 PM, JorgeB said:

you can try connecting up to 8 disks directly to the HBA, even if it doesn't allow array start, you can see if the connected disks are detected and if yes it suggests the problem is the backplane.