supermicro with RAID attached won't boot

[faithie999]

all of a sudden, my supermicro with attached RAID enclosure (sans
digital with rocketraid card) won't boot into the HD.
when i power on the supermicro, the RAID BIOS setup screen comes up
first, as normal, and shows the drives are present and functioning
properly (i have 2 drives set up as "mirrored" and a third drive as a
normal drive).

then, when the raid bios completes, the supermicro HD access light
flashes a couple of times, but nothing else happens. since i never
getting to the chameleon screen there is no way to do a verbose boot.
if i press Delete while the raid bios is loading, i can then access
the supermicro bios settings. i inspected them but nothing looks
amiss.

if shut down the supermicro, power down the raid enclosure, then power
up the computer, the computer boots normally. then i can switch on
the raid box, the single drive mounts, but the mirrored drive shows up
as unreadable--"eject or inititalize". (i understand this isn't the
proper way to mount the RAID enclosure--just providing some addl info,
showing that the raid enclosure isn't dead)

there is nothing yet of any consequence on the mirrored drive, so if
troubleshooting involves reformatting i won't lose anything critical.

what troubleshooting steps would anyone advise?

thanks!

ken

[pete...@cruzio.com]

> all of a sudden, my supermicro with attached RAID enclosure (sans
> digital with rocketraid card) won't boot into the HD.
> when i power on the supermicro, the RAID BIOS setup screen comes up
> first, as normal, and shows the drives are present and functioning
> properly (i have 2 drives set up as "mirrored" and a third drive as a
> normal drive).

Alas, I can't help.

I use the external box (a Rosewill with a Silicon Image port multiplier)
as JBOD with one to four drives which are discrete HFS+ journaled drives
which contain my media library.

The Rosewill device also included a RocketRAID 622 card which is indeed a
RAID card, but which also supports port multipliers (the ICH7R does not
support port multipliers).

I also get the RocketRAID dialog at boot-time, but it either figures out
that it has no drives attached, or it finds the drives and quickly
determines that they are all JBOD.

It is probably safer to use an internal set of RAID drives.

For this specific purpose, NE sells the Supermicro 2 x 2.5" drive shelf * .

OR ...

You may use a pair of external drives in a utility case and then cable
these to two of the four SATA connectors on the Supermicro's mobo.

* 1 TB 2.5" drives have become available. So have 750 GB. The last time I
purchased 2.5" drives, 500 GB was the largest which were available.

[Christian Wacker]

Have you tried booting the server via a cd or usb drive with chamelion on it? Your bootloader may not be seen properly anymore.

-----Original Message-----
From: faithie999 <faith...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:14
To: Hackintosh Questions - Answers <hq...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [HQ-A] supermicro with RAID attached won't boot

all of a sudden, my supermicro with attached RAID enclosure (sans
digital with rocketraid card) won't boot into the HD.
when i power on the supermicro, the RAID BIOS setup screen comes up
first, as normal, and shows the drives are present and functioning
properly (i have 2 drives set up as "mirrored" and a third drive as a
normal drive).

then, when the raid bios completes, the supermicro HD access light

flashes a couple of times, but nothing else happens. since i never
getting to the chameleon screen there is no way to do a verbose boot.
if i press Delete while the raid bios is loading, i can then access
the supermicro bios settings. i inspected them but nothing looks
amiss.

if shut down the supermicro, power down the raid enclosure, then power
up the computer, the computer boots normally. then i can switch on
the raid box, the single drive mounts, but the mirrored drive shows up
as unreadable--"eject or inititalize". (i understand this isn't the
proper way to mount the RAID enclosure--just providing some addl info,
showing that the raid enclosure isn't dead)

there is nothing yet of any consequence on the mirrored drive, so if
troubleshooting involves reformatting i won't lose anything critical.

what troubleshooting steps would anyone advise?

thanks!

ken

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[faithie999]

On Feb 15, 11:54 am, Christian Wacker <pizzaboy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you tried booting the server via a cd or usb drive with chamelion on it? Your bootloader may not be seen properly anymore.

it boots fine if i power down the external raid enclosure before
starting the computer.

end of the story:

this will have to remain a mystery.

i removed the 2 mirrored drives from the raid enclosure, leaving just
the single drive in the enclosure. the computer booted fine.
so, there must be something flaky about one or the other of the
mirrored drives, despite the fact that they were reported as "normal"
by the RAID controller during boot.

i reinstalled the 2 drives to be mirrored, then used the raid bios
setup to remove them, and reinstalled them as a RAID 1. then the
computer booted fine. of course lion wanted to reinitialize the
mirrored set, which i expected.

ken