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HP N54L - found twice, never again


mrpijey

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Hello!

 

I have an issue that is making me bald at the moment...

 

First of all, my config and procedure:

 

HP N54L with modded bios (worked great with FreeNAS for a year)

Using only onboard LAN

Jun's Loader v1.03b (model DS3615xs)

5 SATA harddrives plugged in

 

I followed the excellent guide by Polanskiman, created the bootable USB stick and booted up the HP box. Synology Assistant found the unit, and I applied the DSM patch file DSM_DS3615xs_24922.pat (DSM 6.2.2-24922). It seemed to install, and asked to reboot the machine. After the reboot the box never came back online again, so I thought I would reset everything and start from scratch, but apply an older DSM instead.

 

So I recreated the USB stick, rebooted, and Synology Assist once again found the unit. But this time it asked me to restore the config (detected config on the harddrives), I had no option to install a DSM manually. So I figured I would try that. It rebooted once again, but never came back online.

 

Fine, so I rebooted again and tried the reinstall boot option. Synology Assistant never found the unit.

 

So I figured I would clean the harddrives. I put back my FreeNAS USB stick, booted it up and deleted all pools and wiped the drives. Back in with the DSM USB stick and rebooted. Nothing found.

 

I unplugged all the harddrives. Nothing found. I added a new harddrive never used before. Nothing found. Reflashed the USB stick. Nothing found. I even tried reflashing with an older boot loader (Jun's Loader v1.02b), nothing found. Whatever I do now it won't get any connection, it won't get any IP assigned. I tried everything. I wanted 10-15 mins between the reboots and checks.

 

I put back the FreeNAS stick and it boots just fine, so hardware is fine, so is network connections, all with the same drives, hardware, cables and settings, so it's nothing of that. And Synology Assistant did find the device twice, but never after that.

 

Anyone have any idea what to do next?

Edited by mrpijey
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My N54L runs 6.1.7 with the 1.02b loader. My understanding that 6.2 does not have support for the onboard nic and so people are buying and installing network cards with the intel chipset to make the later version work.

I have looked at my install notes and see that I disabled C1E in the bios (I am running a "stock" bios but that shouldn't matter) and I can't see whether I used the mac address provided in the loader or whether I used one that matched the serial number I have.

So I would check the bios; recreate the USB stick with 1.02b following Polanskiman's instructions; remove HDD drives; attach keyboard and display and watch to see whether you get the boot messages and the chance to select the appropriate option.

Once the boot is complete, then the box should be on your network. You can't install anything at that point as you have no HDD but if you get that far, then the loader is good.

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That might explain why the unit won't come online after the installation, but I can't still understand why it won't work when I reset everything, especially since it worked the first time. So the USB stick should be fine as well, and I have a secondary one with 1.02b with the same result.

 

I've checked, C1E is disabled, and already tried without harddrives, and clean harddrives. And I don't get any special boot messages except for the choice at boot to boot normal or reinstall (tried both). It would have been one thing if it never worked, but it worked through two boots, but no more.

 

Tomorrow I'll get one of those PCIe NICs and try with that, since I will need it either way if I would ever get this to work again. I just wonder why the onboard NIC doesn't work with 6.2, they must have removed something in it, I wonder if it can be re-added from 6.1...

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Seems to work now with the additional Intel NIC. I can't explain why it wouldn't show up at all with the internal NIC, but it works with the Intel one. Hopefully we get some patch or driver in the future to use it again.

 

I can also report I've updated DSM to "DSM 6.2.2-24922 Update 3", and apart from the unit not turning itself off when shutting down DSM, and the lack of onboard LAN, it seems stable. The same hardware with FreeNAS caused me data corruption and issues, but works great with XPEnology.

 

Thank you!

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  • 2 months later...

I am trying to get 6.2 running on my microserver, using loader 1.30b.

I have N54L it is running moded bios, C1E disabled, Intel dual nic. Intenral nic disabled. Just one drive in the first raid port. I have created the usb drive with the ammended grub.cfg but when it boots from the usb it does not appear in synology assistant, and when I look in the router no sign of any connections. It all works fine running windows 10, both nics show up.

Bit miffed, any suggestions?

Thanks

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It does take a while before it pops up. And make sure your MAC address for the port you're using is properly added to the config file (add both ports). Since you have two ports maybe the cable is in the wrong port? I am running mine with a quad port Intel NIC and got all four ports operational.

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I used the DS3615xs image, and the serial for that model. The intel nic was an  NC360T previously used in an xpenology N54L box. I entered both mac addresses without the colons. 

 

As I mentioned the nic works fine with windows 10. I was wondering if I have to edit the sata port entry as the N54L has both the raid adapter and the standard sata connector. With the modded bios I had the connector for the cd drive connected to a ssd boot drive under windows. It up shows as the 5th drive in the sata chain. 

 

I was thinking that I could install 6.1 with the native nic enabled and remove the intel NC360T  and use the 1.02b loader. Bit frustrated with getting the system to work!

 

Thanks for any tips.

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The choice of SSD should not be any issue, if you see it booting and get the messages on the screen that's all that is needed. I suggest you test with the previous version of the loader and an older DSM to see if it works first, just to make sure that something else isn't causing any issues. Not that it should matter, but try without any harddrives etc, you should still get into the web interface. And make sure you don't have any other devices (other USB drives etc) connected. And what RAID adapter are you referring to? The N54L doesn't come with any RAID adapter, and you setup the SATA ports to run as AHCI (no  RAID as RAID requires its own drivers), however that shouldn't affect the booting unless the system crashes or hangs at some stage of the boot process.

 

Check in your router if any IP gets even assigned to the box after the boot as it should get an IP before the assistant or anything else can reach it. Beyond this I have no clue what to check for except double checking that all entries are proper in the config file (make sure you use a proper text editor to prevent extra control chars to be embedded etc) and that you don't have any weird NIC/SATA/CPU settings in the BIOS that will cause the boot to fail.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/26/2020 at 10:53 PM, lamber said:

Use 6.2.3 with onboard NIC. You need Jun's Loader v1.03b (model DS3615xs) and everything work fine. They something changed in 6.2.3 to work with the onboard NIC

What PAT file did you used? There is no official 6.2.3 for DS3615xs

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 5/26/2020 at 7:31 AM, TBone said:

Can anyone else confirm 6.2.3 (DSM_DS3615xs_25426.pat) works with N54L using Jun Loader 1.03b without the additional Intel NIC?

I just updated for testing on the "backup"-NAS a N54l from 6.2.3-25423 to 25426 and it works fine.

 

image.png.aec6f7f49cf0f1e04fa42ded3937e167.png

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a N36L - so the same motherboard but with a slower processor. I was initially unable to get DSM 6.2.2 working (with the extra.lzma file) - the network card only responded prior to installing DSM, after the initial reboot it stopped responding. So I reverted back to 6.1.7, which worked on the first attempt (and the NIC responded on the first reboot).

 

However, a few days ago when trying this again I noticed that on the first reboot after installing DSM (although the NIC wasn't responding) the hard drive was quite busy, doing what I presume is rebuilding/updating the kernel using the additional drivers ... because after a couple of minutes, it rebooted again by itself, this time the network card did start responding - and it worked fine.

 

But ... as mentioned above, Synology seem to have reverted the driver changes again for v6.2.3, meaning you can use the v1.03b loader without needing to add the "extra.lzma" file and the network card will work on the first boot after installing the DSM software ... which is even better 😀

 

Oh and auto hibernate (after HDD power down) worked on v6.1.7, it doesn't work on 6.2.2 or 6.2.3. However, a scheduled shutdown and/or startup works fine, which is what I use now because I found that the auto hibernate was too inconsistent.

Edited by sounds2k
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On 6/8/2020 at 10:51 AM, sounds2k said:

Oh and auto hibernate (after HDD power down) worked on v6.1.7, it doesn't work on 6.2.2 or 6.2.3.

It did work on 6.2.2 with addon Intel NIC. Broken in 6.2.3, but builin NIC works now.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have HP microserver G7 too.

To install 6.2.3. on it i need to write synoboot.iso on flash (GPT) and boot server.

I see XPE intro page, but i don't see Synology in my network. So, I suppose, that I have trouble with my NIC (I've tried Untel one and integrated one).

I used 6.1 on it, but don't remember what configuration to synoboot.iso i made earlier.

Please, help :-)

Thank you in advance!

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18 minutes ago, Gladiuss said:

Am i rigtht, that you made no configuration (like PID/VID) for synoboot to start?

 

I have changed it for v6.2.3, because USB was visible. Heven't needed this change for previous versions.

 

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