Upgraded MB / CPU / RAM - think TrueNas is not seeing drives

[Dravinian]

I will be upfront, I don't think this is Truenas' fault, but I don't know any workarounds for this or even if that supposition is correct.

I have an expansion card:

SupaHub SATA Card 8 Port, Non Raid SATA Expansion Card for SATA III 6G Hard Drives for Desktop, Includes 8 SATA Cables and 2 SATA Splitter Cables

It is not the best in the word, but it worked fine on my old motherboard. I upgraded to an Gigabyte Aurous Master z690 - and I can see in the system info that the Bios recognises that something is plugged into the PICEx4_1: PCIe 2.0 x1 @ 2.0 x1.

However, the bios only shows 6 SATA drives in the standard motherboard ports, and there are another 3 plugged into that expansion card - but these are not seen by the bios.

I think, though I am not 100% sure, that this is causing me a problem when I try and boot into Truenas - as I keep getting a boot error, and I am wondering whether it is because Truenas is expecting to see 9 drives as that was the configuration the last time it booted up?

Currently, I am getting a KDB enter panic when booting, with a cpu_reset but the messages are flashing past so fast it is hard to tell exactly what is happening.

I was just wondering if anyone had encountered a similar problem and knew of a workaround?

Or if anyone knew what I should look at to narrow down on the issue. Thanks.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Without more information, it looks indeed as if that SATA card is the culprit. The first thing I would do is remove the card and see whether the mentioned problems go away.

Going forward you should switch to an HBA flashed to IT mode.

 

[Dravinian]

Taking out the card resulted in this - which I think is the same error as with the card:

Fatal Trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
cpuid = 19; apic id = 4e
fault virtual address = 0xfffffff8216e7e8
fault code = supervisor read instruction, protection violation.

Not sure if that helps to be honest, but the page instead of flashing past actually stopped here and gave me a chance to take a note..

 

[Dravinian]

Moved back to my old motherboard / cpu / ram combination - sees all drives, boots up just fine.

So I didn't manage to corrupt the installation while moving - this is really just down to the expansion card.

I see the suggestion for a HBA flashed to IT mode - is there a reputable place that I can get one of these? That being a shop rather than ebay?

 

[ChrisRJ]

So it appears your "new" motherboard is damaged.

As to the HBA, you can get those from IT refurbishers, but probably not flashed. For the latter there are plenty of tutorials. What do you mean by "shop rather ebay"? A physical retail store where you can go?

 

[Dravinian]

It might be that, my old motherboard doesn't show the extra drives in bios either, but is able to send that information through to TrueNAS, but that board has PCIex1 slots, where as the newer boards don't really have those slots, only PCIe x16 slows - it recognises that the card is there though.

I was reading that this board has a conflict with the PCIe slots when you also have an NVME M.2 in place - depends on where you place these - so I will be looking at removing the NVME I have installed and seeing whether this assists.

I am not all that hopeful though.