Added 10th drive, system won't boot -> SATA card option ROM conflict (SOLVED)

I've been running Unraid for quite some time without any problems adding more disks when need arised. Now I'm trying to add 10th drive and at the same time I had to add a SATA-II card to provide two additional ports. The SATA card bios seems to recognice the new drive properly but the system hangs on a black screen after the SATA-card bioses finish. The system will not enter even the main bios settings which should be presented after the SATA-card bioses. If I disconnect the power cable from the 10th drive the system boots up normally (and also goes to main bios setup).

So could this be a power supply issue, not providing enough juice? Any other ideas which might be causing this? I do not have an extra power supply and I hesitate to spend ~100euros just to try out.  Any help is appreciated.

The system components are:

- Antec Truepower Trio TP3-650

- Highpoint RocketRAID 2310 SATA controller

- Fujtech 76611A SATA controller 2pcs (Sil3132 based)

- SAMSUNG HD204UI (2+1 pcs)

- SAMSUNG_HD154UI (2 pcs)

- SAMSUNG_HD103UJ (6 pcs)

Looks like it. That psu that you have has 3 +12v rails.  So either you need to distribute the load to all three rails (19A each) or get a new one.  I'm not sure how many amps each piece of your hardware is drawing.

I would look to 1 of 4 things:

1 - PSU cant handle the additional load of the new HDD                    <-- Does UnRAID boot without the HDD?

2 - Your Boot settings changed when you added the additional HDD <-- I would check this first, as it is $0 to fix

3 - The new HDD is bad                                                                      <-- I would check this second

4 - Random hardware failure with you added the HDD                      <-- Does UnRAID boot without the HDD?

I finally have today some time to tinker with my Unraid box again. In the mean time I did some research on the Antec Truepower Trio TP-650. It seems like the unit is a single rail PSU after all even though it's marketed as a 3 rail unit. I found several reviews and tests where this was discovered (link to Jonny Guru review below). So it should provide around 50A of total power which should be more than plenty.

http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story3&reid=1

About the 4 possibilities suggested by loomdog32:

1. Unraid boots fine without the drive and also fine if the drive is only powered but not connected to the sata card. I will check the power wiring fully even though it should not matter on this "single" rail PSU.

2. Boot order was also my first guess. However it does not get that far before stalling to a black screen. This happens right after the sata card bioses have finished loading and just before it should enter the bios (if del key was hit in the first phase). There is one step after this showing detailed hardware info before drive booting takes place.

3. I will try connecting the new drive to some existing slot and also some existing drive to this new sata card. I'll not let it boot Unraid just to be safe with drive changes...

4. Unraid boots without the drive but I have not checked the syslog for anything regarding the new sata card. I will also grab a few screenshots on the boot screens since there is some differences between the two identical sata cards. I thought they were due to firmware versions being different but there could be something wrong.

Plot thickens... Based on the tests I just performed the problems seem to be related to those two almost identical 2xSATA cards. I removed the new drive altogether from the system, the system booted nicely. I then switched one of the old drives to the new sata card, no boot. Then I removed the old 2xSATA card and replaced it with the new 2xSATA card, system booted nicely again. So the 2xSATA cards seem to work on their own but not when both are installed at the same time and have drives attached. Having one card present with drives attached and the other with no drives causes no problems but whenever I attach a drive to the second card the system won't go past the bios boot sequence. It doesn't matter which card is the "first" one.

This is the new 2xSATA card http://www.inline-info.de/index.php?six_do=cms&six_art=79212〈=en. The older 2XSATA card is almost identical to this one, seems to be older hw-revision as there are some unused connector pins etc. on the PCB. Both are sold under the Fujtech lowcost brand.

Any insight what could be causing this? Is there any common problem using multiple identical PCIe cards? Is there any setting in the bios which could solve the problem (resource allocation etc.)?

What MB do you have? Do you have the option to use another PCIe slot?

The motherboard is MSI K9A2 Platinum. It has 4 PCIe x16 slots and 1 PCIe x1 slot. Originally I placed the new 2xSATA card into the last available PCIex16 slot (display card, RocketRAID and old 2xSATA card taking the rest). I also tried the new card in the x1 slot with no changes.

However I discovered something perhaps interesting when fiddling with different combinations. The MB has 4 native SATA ports and 2 through Promise T3. Back in 2008 when I built the system I was unable to utilise the 2 Promise T3 ports since UnRAID did not see them. So I had them permanently disabled in the bios. Since I was stuck with new card I decided it to give it a second try with the Promise T3. I just enabled the T3 with no drives attached to it. I briefly saw something during boot about "Out of memory" and the RocketRAID bios was not loaded. Ok, so there seems to be some maximum amount of memory for peripherial bioses. I removed the second 2xSATA card but the RocketRAID still refused to load. I disabled the Promise T3 and RocketRAID immediatelly loaded.

Could it be that there is some limit to the amount of memory available for device bioses and that limit is slightly exceeded with the RocketRAID+2 pcs 2xSATA cards and well exceeded with RocketRAID+2xSATA card+Promise T3? I have to study things more closely but this seems to be most promising lead so far. I just don't know if there is anything to be done if this is the problem.

There is a limited space available for BIOSes and I/O. Disable as much features as possible on the MB that aren't used. Don't think much can be done about it. It might be an IRQ- problem too. Are there any BIOS updates for the MB?

Did some further reading on the whole booting/BIOS area, haven't really done that though been around computers literally for decades. Found the following pages to be quite informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_ROM

The magic search term for this case was "option ROM". This combined with RockerRAID and raid terms revealed a ton of pages. The most important finding was that it does not actually make a difference whether the option ROM of an SATA/RAID card is loaded or not during boot if the related drives are not used for booting but instead accessed directly through operating system drivers.

So I tried again to get the motherboard's built-in Promise T3 working. And yes, all the drives attached to the RocketRAID and addon SATA-card were nicely available within UnRAID even though the option ROMs of those cards were never loaded. But the drive attached to the Promise T3 is still not visible in UnRAID  Well that case is now permanently closed, Promise T3 simply isn't supported by UnRAID (at least in 4.4.2 which I'm running).

I also found a lot of stories about not getting multiple identical RAID-cards not working due to option ROM loading errors. Even though most stories were related to getting a true RAID-setup running I guess this could indicate that my two budget SATA-cards will never co-exist happily. I'll continue my quest for a while but I've been waiting for a good excuse to build a proper 20-drive system for quite some time. Perhaps this is excuse....

I also tried to locate port multipliers which would be available back here in Europe since the Sil3132 supports them. Did not find any yet but will keep looking. These would help until the new build is available.

What an earth just happened The new drive is now connected to the new SATA adapter card and is right now preclearing itself.

Well, I thought that perhaps the only problem was related to those two identical option ROMs loading and since they are not necessary perhaps I could somehow prevent either one or both from loading. I plugged in the seconds SATA card, attached the new drive to it, booted and realised that I forgot to disable Promise T3 in bios. I just missed hitting del on time and prepared to reboot but then I saw three lines stating that the option ROMs for three (unnamed) adapters were not loaded. OK, that sound good...way too good to be true...  And then the system progressed to booting UnRAID 

So loading the extra Promise T3 option ROM did the trick, the problematic SATA-card option ROMs were not loaded anymore. Nothing in the syslog and the drive seems to preclearing nicely. There are no settings in the SATA card bios or jumpers on the board so this was basically the only way to get it working. Don't mind at all that I discovered it by accident...

Hope this helps someone else too.