Hi I've been a long time reader first time poster. the problem im having at the moment, is that my server keeps freezing at mup.sys during boot, i've troubleshooted it down to ONE specific issue, and that's insufficient power to my hard-drives in my server. I know this is a pretty standard problem, and many many people forget about it. BUT! I'm trying to avoid buying a new power-supply since the one i have in there is pretty big already and there shouldn't be THAT much draw. My spec's are as follows: Atom 1.6GHz CPU 3x 1TB EcoGreen (5400rpm) drives / one is a WD the other two are SAMSUNG Silicon Image 3152(?) 2x port RAID card. 1x 320GB (7200rpm) drive 1x 500GB (IDE -7200rpm) drive 1x 160 (IDE- 7200rpm) drive What im trying to achieve is to stop the RAID card from booting those drives until the others are spun-up. Since I hear a whirrr from all of the drives and then it reboots. OR Is it possible that I have plugged the drives in incorrectly? I have daisy chained one off another on the one cable. Could it be only ONE cable that has insufficient amps? What is recommended to connect drives to a power-supply? Try and spread them out as evenly as possible? Which drives do you think draw the most power? OR Is this something unrelated? I've run chkdsk on all the drives, and there are no problems there. My current solution to get it booting was removing the two 1TB (5400rpm) drives. Also the version of windows is NOT corrupt. Since it's a fresh install with no problems, and no applications have been installed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thankyou.
what power supply are you using? i don't think that you can delay spin up on SATA drives. i know that SCSI stuff usually doesn't spin up till the card's bios loads but not seen it with SATA.
Codgen 650W 12V ATX Have I missed something?.. It was working before until I replugged a connector in that was partially out of a 1TB drive, because the 2nd drive of my raid kept dropping randomly... Hence why i think it's a power supply issue. Since it boots but the moment those drives spin up.. It dies. failing at mup.sys is a fairly common issue, so i've disabled USB etc in the BIOS and investigated all the things that could cause it. but the moment i plug my drive back in and it goes into the reboot cycle failing at the same point. I've rotated the drives and the cables, it just seems the moment anything else is connected it dies.
I dont know anything about 'rails' i'll wikipedia it. The drives are connected in the following 1TB + 320GB = 2 sata connectors from the PSU 2 IDE drives are connected to ONE molex strand comming off the PSU the 2 other drives (the ones that cause the problem) are connected by 4pin to sata connectors attached to another strand seperate from the 2 IDE drives. should i try and switch up the 2 sata connectors on the PSU to the two drives that cause the problem? (the drives arn't faulty) and leave the IDE ones on their own and use the 4pin to sata connectors on the other two drives?
I've seen a few SATA RAID cards with staggered spin up. My advice OP, get a new (decent PSU), ditch the IDE drives in favour of another 1TB and get a better 4-port RAID card.
sounds like a good idea.. i might ditch the IDE's altogether today.. It's only 600gb NEW SYMPTOM: So, after switching around some cables i managed to get a ntfs.sys blue-screen as the two 1TB drives (brand new) are powering up. Anyone got any idea's?
Look at your bios, for the raid card. You should see it directly after/before your normal bios post. Inside there, depending on model, you can set a delay or staggered spinup of the drives. Mine has it, at least.
Try running a live cd like Hiren or ultimate boot; and run a disc check, could also use a windows disc and do it through the repair console.
As B3CK said your RAID card's BIOS should allow you to change the drive startup setting, I'd be surprised if it did not. Also I'm not sure what server board you have, but my Gigabyte X58 board has a BIOS setting to delay HDD initialization from 0-15 seconds under the Advanced BIOS Features section. Just a guess as far as the BSoD, did you disable or forget to renable AHCI mode?? Changing drives around may have changed the boot order of the drives in the BIOS too, had that happen to me where it tried to boot off of a secondary drive with an old Windows install left on it instead of the one I just newly installed for the new build.
Sadly not in this case, there's no settings for it. It's a cheapie raid card, which may potentially be the problem but at the moment i've isolated it to the power supply either it be cables or the PSU itself. All this is correct, i've gone through the BIOS restored defaults. changed settings to no avail. Are you thinking the 1TB's on the raid card could be corrupt? and they are causing the blue-screen when windows tries to load them? I might just throw this out there, but that's my first guess on this blue-screen.. The drives have been ruffled abit during trying to test this problem their corrupt. Any merit to this? Still looking for suggestions and would be willing to try absolutely anything to get this working... I'll replace the cables connecting the HD's to the raid card this weekend they are molex to sata connectors. Anyone had an experience with these being crap?
No idea about your BSODs but i'd just like to say that Codegen power supplies have a terrible horrible reputation so i wouldn't use it in a server, of all things. Even though you'd hardly put any load on it with that setup.
So this is a Codegen PSU? Foog, what's the model/name of the thing? Unless you changed something on the drives themselves it shouldn't have broken the RAID array! Of course that's a "shouldn't" though, I've had to many issues with my past attempts with RAID arrays to rule it out.
