Wireless keyboard not working when installing VM

[BoltActionBacon]

Backstory: Im rapidly loosing patience with unRaid and really hope that someone can help me. 

I eventually got a windows 10 VM working relatively well but it was with a wired keyboard. The rig is in my living room and the wire was not long enough to reach my couch so i bought a Logitech K830 which would be perfect with its built in touch pad.  When i tried to pass my K830 into the VM through the unRaid GUI and not use my wired keyboard, it would no longer start the VM because the wired keybard was no longer plugged in. I tried to find a solution to this and was unable so i painfully deleted the entire VM so i could start again with the K830 dongle plugged in. I made a new windows 10 VM with just the K830 dongle plugged in and told unRaid to pass it to the VM. The vm will now start but i get to the part where you have to "Press any key to boot" or something like that and the K830 is not being recognized so i can not press any key. Im stuck at that screen. 

 

Im betting that the Logitech K830 would work once i can get windows installed (because ive read that it does) but i cant install windows without a working keyboard. I could plug the wired keyboard back in to install windows but then when i unplug it, the VM wont start again. Ill be back to where i started when i deleted my original VM. 

The even more concerning part is how fragile unraid is with USB connections. I went unRaid and not freenas so that i could have one set of hardware that will be a NAS but also a retro gaming machine. I need to be able to use an xbox controller for my games and that now seems like WAY TOO MUCH to ask, if i cant even get a keyboard to work. Will i just have to make sure i never un plug the xbox controller? 

I really hope the solution isnt buying a PCIE USB card. My computer is in a custom case (I put it in a gutted AV receiver) and the HDDS are currently hanging where that PCIE card would need to be. 

i5 7400

1050 TI,  which i passed through. 

Gigabyte GA-Z170X-GAMING 6 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard

3x8gb of corsair 2400 ram (i know, not ideal)

VM on 200gb of a 512gb SSD acting also as the cache drive. 

 

[testdasi]

It would be a good idea to attach diagnostics Tools -> Diagnostics -> attach full zip file in your next post.

 

Your wireless keyboard probably went into power-saving mode which is a common feature with wireless stuff.

 

Your situation with wired keyboard could have been fixed simply by editing your VM and untick the USB device corresponding to the wired keyboard. No need to nuke your VM.

• If you still have the vdisk of the old VM around, try it (so no need to reinstall Windows).
• If you don't have the old vdisk then install windows with the wired keyboard, make sure everything boots fine, shut the VM down, edit template to untick the wired keyboard + tick the wireless keyboard, save and start VM again.

Your frustration probably stemmed from not asking questions (I'm guessing from your 1 post). Next time you have problems, it's a good idea to ask on here since chances are someone will be able to help.

 

With regards to USB controller, it may not be necessary to buy a PCIe card. Some motherboards have onboard USB controllers that can be passed through.

 

And finally, go watch Unraid tutorials on the SpaceInvader One channel on Youtube.

Edited August 20, 2020 by testdasi

[BoltActionBacon]

Ive been relying heavily on the space invader videos. 

 

I also thought it might be asleep which is why I turned on the VM, then immediately turned on the wireless keyboard then started madly mashing buttons. I also know it wasn't asleep because the backlight was illuminated. 

 

I'll attach the diagnostic when I get home from work and add passing the motherboards USB controllers to my ever growing to-do list. 

 

I did exactly what you described above. I unticked the wired then ticked the wireless before restarting the VM but that didn't work. Did I need to restart the array first or something? Is there any other way to get those parameters to save? 

 

And just to be clear my frustration is not just with this. I've been running into lots of little issue constantly. Too many to post about. Sometimes I will find an older post with the same problems as me but their solution doesn't solve my problem. 

 

Not to hijack my own post but here are a few examples. 

1) I can't copy data from my external HDD to my array (even though I have 3.4 TB remaining because Krusader sees that my cache disk is almost full and confuses that with my space remaining. The forum said to run the movers. I manually run the movers but my cache disk is still almost full somehow. 

2) in the VM, I had demonic sound. I followed space invaders video to the letter but It didn't remove it. It did make it occur less often however. 

3) it requires a hard-line Ethernet cable. This is mostly my fault for not looking hard enough before committing to Unraid. But still, I've spent almost as much on networking gear as I have invest in the actual old unraid computer. Almost all free Linux OS systems support wifi, why doesn't a very mature paying OS support it? I don't care that it's less reliable, it should be an option we can choose if like me the benefits outweigh the costs. People have been saying this for years, yet it's still not available.

4) I wrongly made separate shares for all my media (Tv, movies, pictures, etc). Apparently Plex doesn't like this so I just thought I could merge them in windows. Should take 15 seconds max.... Nope, that's not an unraid feature. I need to install Krusader first. 

5) I wanted to access my data on a phone or outside my network. I start looking to install btsync. That's what everyone recommends on YouTube and such. Well it's old and now called Resillio or something. The recent reviews for Resillio on Google play are terrible. Apparently the Android Resillio app has been completed abandoned and is no longer usable. At this point I put that idea on the back burner and started focusing on the VM again. 

 

I'm not saying all this just to vent, hopefully someone who, like me, isn't a computer wizard and who doesn't have massive amounts of time to commit it research and tweaking will read it and better understand what's involved. If you are time poor but financial rich, i would definitely recommend an off the shelf NAS solution. I'm neither unfortunately. Luckily I decided to tackle this project during a lull at work, otherwise I'd still be trying to find hardware that supports HVM & IOMMU. 

[testdasi]

1. That is typical symptom of wrong share Cache settings. Provide details.
   • For large data transfer, it is almost always better to turn on reconstruct write aka turbo write instead of relying on cache.
2. Is the graphics card the only card in the system i.e. does Unraid also boot with that card? Have you isolated your VM cores? Those are the 2 main reasons causing demonic sound even after msi_utils fix.
3. There are plenty of things that all sorts of mature paying software don't support. Try a set of powerline network adapter if you don't want to run wired (it will use your house main wiring for data, YMMV depending on how your house is wired and distance).
4. Don't understand your problem here. Plex docker (e.g. LSIO one) has separate mappings for Movie, TV, Music etc. Even "merging in Windows" is a matter of creating a folder and mklink -D to the various network share.
5. You totally underestimated the effort required to open your server securely to the Internet. If your ISP allows WAN access then try Nextcloud + LetsEncrypt. If your ISP doesn't allow WAN access then the next best thing is Google Drive.

 

With regards to your VM keyboard issue, the process is: shutdown the VM, wait for it to fully shutdown, edit VM, untick + tick, save, start VM.

Next time you try, make sure to take screenshots of every step + any error.

 

Buying off-the-shelf NAS without proper research can be worse. Don't blame lack of research on money.

[BoltActionBacon]

Thanks for the reply. I'll start tackling your recommendations as soon as I can. 

 

My current "off the shelf" solution is a few windows machines with a 2tb Apple Time Capsule and a raspberry pi running Kodi and Retro pi. With a few exceptions (PS1 emulator on retropie has Issues) my current setup took less than a weekend to set up and has been working beautifully for years; I just ran out of storage space. 

 

In fairness to Unraid I'm asking a lot more out of it than my current NAS but it's advertised, and heavily reviewed as being able to do almost everything I'm asking which is why I'm so critical. 

 

2)Yes it's the only GPU in the system and I told the motherboard in the  bios to boot with the CPU integrated graphics so I could pass through the GPU to the VM (per space invaders). If by isolated you mean in the unRaid web GUI during VM creation yes. I left cpu0 for unraid and have 1,2, & 3 selected for the windows VM. I vaguely remember space invaders further isolating cores for a VM in a different video though. I'll see if I can find that video again.

 

3) I considered power line adapters but I'm pretty sure the power lines from my room with my router, to the living room are not going to match (they go through the junction box).  I bought a router to bridge but it's a pretty terrible one (extremely slow transfer speeds) so Im now looking for a better router to hopefully help me get more than. 1-5mbps. 

[BoltActionBacon]

Thanks for the help, i finally got around to messing with it again and both the wireless keyboard and the demonic sound appear to be fixed. I  downloaded the Nvidia drivers for my GPU before running the acceleration fix and im not sure if thats what did it or not but it appears to be working great now. 

My next tasks are backing up my vdisk, (in the event i screw something up again) then trying to pass through a USB controller, then plex then remote access to my data. 

Ill probably ask this in a new post but i still cant figure out why it showing me out of storage space. I tried the turbo write option that was mentioned above, while changing all my settings to not use the cache, but it didnt work.  I cant copy my vdisk until i figure this out.  Ill keep researching before i bother the good people of Unraid or Reddit with another question though. (i wish there was a help hotline i could call....)

[rootd00d]

What did you do to resolve the keyboard and audio issues?

[BoltActionBacon]

5 hours ago, rootd00d said:

What did you do to resolve the keyboard and audio issues?

This is a really old post, dont really remember sorry. I will say, since then ive decided to work a little harder and pay for a second stand alone PC. lol. The VMs in unRaid work ok if you dont ask much of them but i was wasting too much time trying to get everything working. 

Build a quick VM and access it with Chrome remote desktop for simple stuff from another fully working PC would be my recommendation. 

[rootd00d]

I actually got the keyboard working.  I’m not sure if it was disabling all the HID consumer devices (that obviously weren’t associated with other devices, e.g. Razer mouse, keyboard, etc.), or uninstalling and reinstalling the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center in the VM, or both that and disabling the USB power saving options in the power profile; but it works now, just using USB pass through.

 

Pretty sure I won’t be able to fix the USB audio issues connected to my PCIe card that uses 4 Renesas USB chips that’s passed through - I thought that would have made an improvement.  The Fresco Logic FL1100 $30 card I have works better - have a couple different ones on order that I’ll be able to report status on.  Hopefully even a Thunderbolt dock…

 

Thank you! Maybe this will help someone out.