Problems adding 5th drive

I have unraid pro, and have been running with 4 drives perfectly, parity is good.

My Parity drive is a 500gig Sata drive.  I then have 2 x 500gig IDE drives, and a 320gig SATA.

My motherboard has 4 sata ports.

Problem is, I am trying to add a 320gig SATA drive, but when I do, the whole configuration goes wonky.

Normally when I add a drive it comes up as a new disk, then I add it, format it, etc.

However, when I plug in this SATA drive and login to the server, it tells me there are wrong or missing disks.

And indeed, while it still finds the parity drive and a single 320gig SATA, the other drives are missing.

When I go to devices, not all the drives are present anymore.

If I unplug the 320gig SATA I am trying to add, then everything goes back to normal, but it wants to run a 4 hour parity check every time.

Why can't I add a 5th drive, I have the pro version?

When adding new hardware, sometimes Linux re-assigns drives to different devices, especially if the drive is on a new controller.  This might confuse unRaid so it complains about missing or wrong disks.

Give this a try: 

1. Go to the devices page.  Either write down the current disk assignments (logical slot and model/serial number) or do a screen print.

2. Stop down the array, power down, add the new drive.

Power up... unRaid will complain as before and not start.  Go to the devices page and see if you can assign the same disks to the same logical slots.

You will probably also see the new disk as a possible choice, add that as the next disk in your array.  Go back to the main page and it should then let you start the array.  There will probably be a "Format" checkbox... to format the new drive... use it as before.

If when you get to the devices page all the disks are not present in the drop-down-lists, then you might have some kind of hardware conflict, power supply issue, or a bad cable with the new drive.

Joe L.

I have recorded the configuration for my 4 disks, so I know how to add them back, that is all good.

However, when I power down and plug in the 5th disk then power back up, UnRaid does not see all the disks, I lose the 2 IDE drives.

Weird thing is, in playing around with this I have unassigned and re-assigned drives, and now the IDE drives are showing up as SATA drives whereas in the description they used to say IDE.

Perhaps when trying to add the 5th disk (a SATA) it is problematic because it thinks it already has 4 satas and my mobo only supports 4 satas?  This seems like a stretch, but there definately was a change in description from IDE to SATA for my 2 IDE drives.

I am going to unassign everything, add the 5th drive then boot and see if everything shows up.

As for cables, I have tested them all and they all work.

As for power supply, maybe that is the problem, I will try that next.  My coolmaster case takes 2 power supplies and I do have a spare.  But I would have though 550w modular would be enough for 5 drives, and a celeron cpu and onboard video.

Ok, so power supply was not the issue.

I added a second power supply dedicated to the IDE drives, and they still do not show up when I add my 3rd Sata drive.

All I see when I boot under devices is the 3 SATAs.

I know all cables/power works because if I take out the additional SATA drive, the IDE drives show up.

What to try now?

This could be a BIOS setting issue.  I would suggest trying the different options in the BIOS that affect SATA.  For example, my motherboard has options for SATA support such as "Enhanced," "Legacy," and something else.  I'm not very scientific about it, so I don't know what each option is really doing, but I just cycled through mine until all the drives were seen.  In my case, one setting worked for me when I had a mix of SATA and PATA, but it didn't work for me when I went all PATA.  So that could be it.

The quickest way of doing this is not to actually let the machine boot all the way.  Instead, simply go into the BIOS setup, and you should be able to see what drives are being seen by the motherboard.  If not all the drives are seen, then change the settings+save+reboot+go into BIOS settings again.

Now, if you find that your motherboard is seeing all the drives, but unRAID is not...then cover your head because the sky might be falling as well!

I agree with musicmann, this sounds like a BIOS or similar motherboard problem.  Changing BIOS settings would be my try, looking for a newer BIOS upgrade is another.  One other thing you could try is capturing 2 syslogs, one with the extra drive and one without, so we can compare and see what the kernel is seeing.  What motherboard and hardware do you have?

I am also agreeing that this sounds like a BIOS issue.  My motherboard has an onboard Promise controller and in BIOS there are two settings - RAID or IDE.  If set to RAID, the two IDE drives are not recognized at bootup.  But if set to IDE, the two drives are recognized.  Your issue may be a similar type of setting.

You might also check for an updated BIOS.  Perhaps you're experiencing some weird bug that has been fixed in a later BIOS update.

Good ideas everyone, I am taking my server over to a station with monitor and whatnot to test right now.

Not sure why I didn't think of checking what the bios was seeing, very silly of me.

While I am at it I will check my mobo model, I cant remember off hand.

I will post back with results shortly, hopefully positive ones.

Very strange, I have been playing with which 3 out of 4 SATA ports I was using on the mobo, and which devices where in which one (lots of combination) and voila, finally one of the combinations worked, all my drives show up, now to assign & reboot!

A user recently posted about the P5B-VM D0 MB and having a problem with some of the ports correctly mounting large capacity SATA drives.  They were running an old BIOS - the CPU wasn't even recognized (very dangerous).  Not sure if the BIOS update fixed the problem or not, but I expect it did since that is the most used MB for unRAID.  I guess what I am saying is that there is some precedent for some SATA ports not working with some drives, depending on the BIOS.

It might also be the case that one of your SATA cables is flakey, and that the cable is bent just right and getting a good connection.  I'd recommend keeping a close eye on it.

I think it might be a bios issue still.

I boot once, and it does not boot.  I imagine it is going into the bios to recognize hard drives.

I boot again, and it works. 

But when I reboot later, it does not boot again.

Will look for a bios patch.

I have never applie a bios patch, can it be done through USB stick?  I dont have a floppy or cd drive on my server and dont want one.

Depends on the motherboard.  It is not that hard to create a DOS bootable USB stick and you can run the normal BIOS flash program from there.  Newer MBs often have a special keypress at bootup to put you in a special flash the BIOS mode.  In this mode, the BIOS file can be read from USB or floppy.

Turned out to be a bios setting.

There is a setting called "Sata onboard chip mode"

It can be disables, combined, enhanced, etc.

This mode changes which PATA/SATA ports and drives are allowed and accessible.

It was set to auto, and that did not work.

I set it to enhanced, and all drives show up in UnRaid now.

Thanks everyone!