Crash with console screen black

[Ezekiel]

Hello everyone,

I am getting a system crash with freenas 8.0.2, on any type of file transfer or read. (NSF, smb, or afp). The console screen is on but shows nothing on crash (it's just turns black). i narrowed down most of my problems to a sata expansion card. (siig sc-sa4r12-s2) It's been removed since. Buts still many many random crashes on writes and reads.

Specs:

New jetway mobo itx (jnc62k-lf)
New amd 840 3.2ghz
New 1gb ram (tried many different sticks of ram, 2gb and 1gb)
2 2tb seagate hdd (zfs striped)
1 1tb wd hdd (zfs)
1 750gb wd hdd (zfs)

I pulled hard drives and tested on windows machines, all works fine.

I tried freenas on three different drives, 4gb USB, 8gb USB, and a 160gb wd hdd. Same result.

I have tried freenas 7-8.0.2 (and the newest beta, 32 and 64 bit)

This all new hardware except for the hard drives. They came from my other freenas server. It had the same problem, so I bought new hardware. Now I can run for a while, but the console screen will turn black. And freenas will lock up. Ie no webgui or reading from windows 7, OSS lion, boxeebox or xbmc. Smb seems to work the longest. Nfs and afp crashes right away.

I run many freenas servers for work and family, but I never ran into this problem. I have spent 3 months googling, and nothing. So any help would be very welcomed!!!

 

[Milhouse]

New PSU too? Did the system crash with "freenas 7-8.0.2 (and the newest beta, 32 and 64 bit)" - you don't say whether it does or not. Does Windows run on this system without crashing, or maybe Ubuntu? Does memtest86+ run for 24 hours without problems, or does that crash as well?

Strange that you should have this problem with two systems, was the other FreeNAS server based on the same motherboard, what else does it have in common with the "new" system?

 

[Ezekiel]

Psu is new too. The system crashed on the latest freenas 7 and on all version of 8. It did run for two weeks(on 7) till the next crash. The others crash rightway.The other system was an intel board with a Xeon CPU. That one ran for a year, with minor crashes. mem test done, mem is fine.

Is the black screen normal for a crash? I had many crashes before with other systems, but never with a black screen.

I do get less crashes if I don't use auto import. And just wipe very drive. The system will run for a few hours before a crash.

I did try a live version of ubuntu, it ran well.

 

[ProtoSD]

I didn't see where you said how much total RAM you were using. It could be not enough RAM if all you're using is 1 or 2 GB. This link might help even though it is written for a 32-bit processor, the tuning could still be helpful. If you're running the AMD64 version of FreeNAS 8.02, you just need to edit the loader.conf and reboot. Here's the link:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...rough-FreeNAS-on-a-32bit-proc-with-low-memory.

 

[Ezekiel]

Thank you, i will try this tonight. But any idea on the black console screen? could a hard drive be causing the whole system to lock up and make the console screen go blank?

 

[survive]

Hi Ezekiel,

First thing I would do is memtest the box. Grab the ISO here: http://www.memtest.org/ and let it run overnight. No point trying to troubleshoot a dodgy box.

I would think 1GB of RAM is simply just not enough memory...with memory as cheap as it is right now I'd strongly advise you to pick up a few more gigs.

-Will

 

[jgreco]

Presumably no screen saver, right?

Blank screen sounds like hardware going south. Replace your power supply, or at least test with a different one. I know you said it was new, but that could mean that it's untrustworthy too, especially since power supplies are notoriously great places for manufacturers to cut corners, and for users to buy based on price alone.

 

[Ezekiel]

@jgreco. Screen saver is off. I will try a bigger psu tonight. You are very right about them cutting corners!

@survive. Memory is new, i also have a 2gb i will replace with. The mobo only has one dimm slot, and spec max it out at 2gb.

Thanks for the reply's!

 

[Ezekiel]

I started all over, and using a nightly release (r9006). Both servers have been running for two days with no crashes. :)