Did I mention that I’ve not built a computer in six years? Yeah, well I forgot how bloody frustrating it is when things don’t work exactly as planned. To recap, I have a donor machine with motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, DVD drive and power supply—the guts. My mission was to transplant that stuff into a new case and add disks and additional connectivity and install FreeNAS.
The first step was to disassemble the donor machine, which wasn’t a problem at all. The breakdown was smooth with only one trip to HP’s support site to figure out how an interlocking part became not so locking.
Next, I installed the motherboard into the new case. It wasn’t that big of a deal; however, the HP motherboard was fastened to a metal mounting plate and I had to decide whether to keep the HP mount or ditch it. I wanted to scrap it, but realized the CPU heat-sink and fan were mounted to the metal plate, so that decision was made for me. This created a tighter fit than I expected, but in the end turned out to be a very solid.
My next task was to get some power in the case, so I proceeded to install the 460W power supply from the donor. And that’s when I encountered my first hiccup. I didn’t think to measure the power supply to make sure it would fit in the new case—a standard ATX case—and I assumed, stupidly, that the power supply from the HP was of an ATX form-factor. Needless to say, it was not. I don’t even know what you call the form-factor, but it’s height is 97mm high, which is too tall for a standard ATX (86 mm).
It was time to break out the wallet again. At this point I’m thinking the cost of this build is going to get out of hand. Instead of ordering a power supply online and saving some money, I wanted instant gratification. I headed over to Best Buy and picked up a BFG 550W GX Modular Power Supply for $89.99 + tax. It turned out to be a very nice piece. It’s modular cable system means the power cables can be plugged in as necessary, to avoid a nest of unnecessary wires. It’s a sleek design with a huge fan on the bottom. It fit nicely in the case. My only real complaint is that the cables are difficult to corral which makes cable management a bit difficult in a tight space.
At this point I began making connections to the motherboard. I hate this part. Every motherboard and case have different sets of connectors for things like the power button, the reset switch and the power/HDD LEDs. It’s slightly worse with the donor board because it had an all-in-one front control panel that was a single plug. I had to do a bit of trial-and-error to figure out which pins were what to get the switches and LEDs working.
I proceeded to install the rest of the components—the graphics card, the FireWire 400/800 card, the DVD drive, the four SATA drives and the IDE-to-CF adapter for the Compact Flash card. The hard drive placement was a bit tricky. Even though the case has four 3.5″ bays, they are configured in such a way that three drives are stacked directly on top of each other and the fourth bay is tucked away under the optical drive bay. I decided I would space them out and use the second 5.25″ bay above the optical drive to house one of the drives. This would allow for slightly better cooling. Once I had everything connected, I powered it on and to my delight everything was functioning.
Next I needed to configure the RAID controller. As previously mentioned, I made the decision to run RAID5 which the controller handled; however, the controller had a maximum volume limit of 2TB, which means I had to create two separate volumes to present to FreeNAS. This was not desirable as I wanted one big aggregate. I searched for information on this controller and in process learned that the built-in Intel 82801GR/GH RAID controller was not a great RAID controller. So I made a decision to use FreeNAS’ software RAID instead. I set the disks back to an un-RAIDed configuration.
My next chore was to install the FreeNAS system to verify the disks before I tightened everything up. I downloaded the FreeNAS LiveCD ISO as well as the embedded IMG, unsure which I’d use. I started with the LiveCD, burned the ISO to a CD and popped it in the DVD drive. The machine booted to the FreeNAS boot loader screen. I proceeded with the default boot option. FreeNAS started to load and then froze. I made an incorrect assumption that the CD didn’t work and proceeded to waste two hours trying to figure out how to load the IMG file onto the Compact Flash card. After failing to find anything that worked, I returned to the LiveCD. This time I let the machine boot and left it alone while I took a fifteen minute break.
When I came back to the machine, to my surprise, FreeNAS had loaded and I was presented the install option. When the install was finished I removed the CD and rebooted the machine. The first indication that something wasn’t right was the boot loader didn’t countdown from five seconds and automatically boot with defaults. Instead it hung on that screen waiting for user input. I chose the default boot option and after a few lines of boot information, the machine froze. I rebooted again and chose the boot option with verbose output so I could see what was going on. It was hanging on the line “Calibrating clocks…” At this point I thought there was a BIOS problem, so I booted into BIOS setup and noticed the clock was not holding the time. I set the time and then booted back into FreeNAS. Again, I let the machine sit for a while and it finally booted up. I decided to continue with the setup just to verify the disks and such and come back to the boot problem later.
So I setup the RAID and FreeNAS started initializing the array. But there was another problem. From all of the tutorials I read, upon creating and initializing the array, the status will change to “REBUILDING”. Mine didn’t. It was stuck on “Initializing.” I let it be for quite a few minutes and came back and it was still initializing. At this point I was so frustrated that I called it a night but left it running.
The next morning I returned to FreeNAS and it was still initializing the array. I decided to reboot the machine and this time it booted up perfectly without any delay. I have no idea why, but hell, one less thing to try to debug. I deleted the RAID and started over. This time it worked and started rebuilding the array. I’ll explain how I configured and setup FreeNAS in the next post.
Once the array was built I started testing it, keeping a close eye on the temperature of the disks as I knew cooling would be an issue with the case and the way I had to arrange the drives. Under some duress, the second (bottom of the 3.5″ bay) and fourth drive (under the optical drive) temperatures started rising above the typical 35°C. I went to the computer store to pick up an additional fan. I placed the fan next to the front intake fan and positioned it to blow across the drives to get some cool air on the two drives that needed it. There’s an exhaust vent on the other side of the case which helps because the added fan blows cool air across the drives and the heat out of the vent on the other side. This addition brought the drive temperatures down below 35°C.
I took everything apart again to route the cables. Cable management is a skill that I do not possess. Some techs build machines meticulously with perfectly tidy and clean cable management regardless of how much stuff is crammed inside the box. That is not me. I did my best to clean it up. It’s not great, but not terrible…at least that’s my subjective opinion. Once I got the cables cleaned up I plugged the NAS in and booted it to make sure it all still worked. In process I ended up frying the Compact Flash card. It most likely shorted out because it was resting on top of the optical drive. I had another 2GB card from my camera and so I used that. Without a proper place to put the IDE-to-CF adapter, I tucked it down away from metal parts. This was not an ideal solution, but the best I could do without re-engineering the placement of everything.
So now the build is complete. Of course having to replace the Compact Flash card meant I had to reinstall FreeNAS, which I did and will discuss in the next post. Here are a few photos of the finished product. All in all, it was a very frustrating build, but the end result turned out quite nice.
