JohnO

Yes the motherboard has a PS/2 keyboard connection. I've got a note out to some local friends to see if they have a PS/2 keyboard I can borrow. I did also try every USB port on the machine - just in case. Thanks for you ideas. I appreciate it. John

With the M1015 installed (and all other PCI-e cards removed) the boot process never gets as far as allowing keyboard input from the USB keyboard. With the card removed, the system boots as expected (or -- with everything removed, gives the expected message about inserting boot media).

I know that it is NOT in IT mode. My first step was trying to boot so that I could update the firmware. That is where I'm stuck.

After more attempts, I'm starting to believe I can't use this M1015 controller board (at least, with current firmware) with my ASRock 970 Extreme 4 motherboard. It continues to hang at the same spot. Unfortunately, I don't have any other machines to use to try to swap the firmware.

Ok -- crisis averted. Thank goodness for my note taking! I had a similar issue in 2016, in that something caused the BIOS to reset to defaults, and by default, it selected PCIe over PCI for graphics card, (I have one of each) and it turns OFF IOMMU, which means none of the passthrough devices (the PCIe graphics controller and, more importantly the SAN controller) were seen by VMware ESXi. Resettings those two settings and restarting the machine fixed my issues! So -- this leaves me back where I started -- not sure if there is a conflict not allowing the old and new disk controllers to be active in the machine at the same time? Motherboard is an: ASRock 970 Extreme4 AMD AM3+ John

Neat!

Sadly -- my first attempt did not go well. I installed the new controller card (without any drives attached), and restarted the system. The system saw the controller card on boot, and gave the message about no drives found, and said to press any key to continue -- but no keyboard input was allowed. I shutdown, removed the card, and booted up again. This time around the system saw the old controller, but first started to boot to my unRAID USB stick. I shut down, removed the unRAID stick, and it started up again, but graphics came up on the wrong video card. ESXi started to boot this time, but would hang just after 'iodm loaded successfully'. I could connect to ESXi from the web interface even though the ESXi console still shows "loading" for the remaining drivers, but ESXi didn't see the passthrough controller, nor the video card that was previously set for passthrough! Not sure where to go next. I'm tempted to start from scratch with the new controller card, and just rebuild everything... But that is always more work than I think it'll be... Any ideas? Could this be as simple as the BIOS is confused? Thanks! John

Great stuff! Thanks for taking the leap for us all.

Thanks for that reminder. I bought this stuff about 3 months ago, but then life got busy. Now -- for some reason -- I have extra time at home...

Thanks @Doron -- that does sound like a great approach. Now to see if I have a spare PCI port of the appropriate type to have both disk controllers active! The system has been running smoothly for a few years now, so I haven't had to crack the case for a couple of years.

Greetings, I'm running UnRAID 6.8.3 as a Guest OS on ESXi 6.7.0. It's been running well for years, but I have a very old disk controller that can't handle drives larger than 2 TB. I've recently purchased a new controller and new (larger) drives. What is the recommended approach to migrate from the old controller and drives to the new controller and drives? "New" controller (not that new of a product, but new to me) is an LSI SAS9220-8i. The whole controller is passed through to the UnRAID VM. It looks like I might be able to attach all the old and new drives to this (8 connectors) but not sure if my motherboard can power 8 drives... I'm in no hurry, but looking for suggestions. Thanks! John

Thanks! Since memory was the issue, and since UNRAID is running as a VM, I just increased memory to the VM, and the upgrade went smoothly. John

Greetings, I recently attempted to upgrade from 6.7.0 to 6.7.2, and the upgrade would fail with filled disk. I can connect to server, delete all in /previous and continue on with the 6.7.0. I could replace the USB boot device, but the device itself is showing 3.5 GB free. Is a partition getting filled up? Is there some directory I should manually clear out? I've attached my diagnostics. Thanks for any suggestions. Thanks! John oshtank-diagnostics-20190831-0311.zip

I need to have coffee before responding. But yes, also true, no root password in my unRAID server either. That caused me to look at the installation process. I don't recall a step requesting me to set root password. My initial unRAID installation was a few years ago, and I've been upgrading ever since. So now I'm unsure if setting a password, or disabling root would cause a problem or not.

Interesting. You are correct. Root is disabled on this Mac. I guess I haven't found anything I need to do on this Mac that I can't do with sudo.