HP N54L AHCI errors on boot

[Harmless Drudge]

I've been running FreeNAS (currently FreeNAS-9.10.1-U4 (ec9a7d3)) on an HP N54L with 16Gb ECC RAM and 6 drives (1 USB boot disk and, currently, 5 2Tb WD HDs) for a couple of years. It's a backup machine that gets woken up, accepts an rsync, and then shutdown again.

In recent months I've had some trouble with what appeared to be just a lot of errors on a failing HD. I replaced the drive and all was well again for a month. Now the problem has resurfaced, with the machine failing, again, to boot on a wake-on-LAN packet -- 2 nights running. The problem goes away (so far) if the machine is manually rebooted.

Smartctl suggests drives are good. Zpool status is fine.

Unfortunately, the output of the boot sequence is largely gibberish to me. It looks as if there's an AHCI error, but I'm not able to interpret it. Have just followed the instructions here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/10090/ to capture the output (/var/log/messages seem to have the last boot only). The error was also a symptom of failed boots with the failed drive (an old 250Gb drive I used for ZFS logs), but now it's happening with a 2Tb drive. Wondering if I have a drive controller problem.

Posting in case anyone else has seen this.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

It's a backup machine that gets woken up, accepts an rsync, and then shutdown again.

The unfortunate thing about this is that all the built-in maintenance and diagnostics that can give you early warning of trouble is pretty much shut out. It's your choice, but it doesn't let FreeNAS do what it does best.

capture the output

Might be better just to post a debug file: System -> Advanced -> Save Debug