Darn! My next step would also be to try booting from USB. I found the manufacturer's product page: BKHD-1264-NAS but even the user's manual did not help me, I didn't see anything I could be doing wrong.
12gen N-series Nas motherboard (topton, cwwk, ... )
- Thread starter Steffe
- Start date
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I really dont know how to help you guys, but inside of bios itself you have option to set bios boot priority.
Bdw.
Aliexpress seller have say to me that thay work on new bios but will not be release right now, this was in regards when i ask why bios is so lock down, so thay share how to unlock it
Bdw.
Aliexpress seller have say to me that thay work on new bios but will not be release right now, this was in regards when i ask why bios is so lock down, so thay share how to unlock it
Ok, but where? I have gone through every menu and submenu....Even used CTRL+F1 in the Advanced menu to get new options.
In the BOOT menu I can only select what type to boot from, not which device specifically. It doesn't even see the Windows install USB.
The SATA SSD contains a TREUNAS install from my old build. The NVME drive is empty.
Even the Boot Override does not show any devices.
BKHD already has one BIOS update on their website and CWWK has provided updates for their mini PCs in the past.
ctrl+f1 doesn't do anything if you have BKHD n100 board (at least not for me)
I just check bkhd's site and bios (21.12.2023) is same as one that came with board, so no update.
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Just to be clear about the CWWK-ADLN-NAS board, there is no BIOS option to enable HDMI (at least to my knowledge), I just remembered having problems with it the first time I powered it up. I recommend to try the following procedure to get everything working:
- Connect a display via DP.
- Turn on the board (wait several minutes on first boot with new RAM) and enter the BIOS settings.
- Load default BIOS settings.
- Save settings and don't change anything besides booting options until step 13!
- Create a bootable USB stick for the OS installation following the documentation of the OS vendor (recommended: Windows 11, but might also work with Ubuntu or other distros).
- I even recommend creating a completely new GPT partition table on the stick first and follow the instructions for GPT boot.
- The older MBR partitioning scheme might not be working with the CWWK board.
- Make sure the OS installation stick boots on another UEFI system.
- Try to boot the stick on the CWWK. If it does not boot:
- Enter the BIOS and check if the stick is listed in the manual boot options. If so, try booting from there.
- Try a different USB slot (e.g. USB 2.0 instead of 3.0).
- Make sure that besides the USB flash drive, you have only one completely empty drive connected as the OS installation destination.
- Check the destination drive on another system and remove any old partitions from it so that it appears as an empty drive.
- I even recommend creating a completely new GPT partition table without adding any partitions.
- The older MBR partitioning scheme might not be working with the CWWK board.
- After installing a Windows/Linux OS, make sure all drivers are up to date.
- Install an Intel GFX driver, e.g. using their tool[1] on Windows.
- Reboot the system. While the system is running again with the new driver, connect a display via HDMI.
- If it does not work, make sure you have followed all the previous steps correctly.
- If it works, reboot and check if HDMI still works (it should).
- Install an OS of your choice and check if HDMI still works (it should).
- Now you can go ahead and try BIOS changes, add additional drives, etc. Do this step by step so that you know exactly what change might be breaking your system. Then maybe you'll be able to find a solution or workaround searching the web.
Best, Chripo
[1] Intel® Driver & Support Assistant
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In the BIOS I ended up setting "Boot option filter" to UEFI and Legacy and the SSD was available as a boot drive. But then it still would not boot from the drive.
Took out the USB drive (Toshiba 32GB) to replace the OS with UBUNTU...but it seemed to be broken! My PC just did no longer recognized it, nor did the laptop. Looks like the board just killed it(?). Replaced it with a Sandkisk Ultra with WIN11 OS, and all worked!
Then I checked the SSD on my pc and it work just fine, it booted up TRUENAS. On this board it just did not want to boot! So I reinstalled TRUENAS on it and gave it another shot!
In the BIOS it now says: EUFI OS (P1: Kingston SV300). Now it boots right off the SSD.
I think the broken USB drive somehow held back the system, causing all sort of problems. I also ordered a 8GB Crucial for €28, for testing, now I will keep that one as a spare, just in case.
Now I can do some new testing with TRUENAS and the SATA disks....
Took out the USB drive (Toshiba 32GB) to replace the OS with UBUNTU...but it seemed to be broken! My PC just did no longer recognized it, nor did the laptop. Looks like the board just killed it(?). Replaced it with a Sandkisk Ultra with WIN11 OS, and all worked!
Then I checked the SSD on my pc and it work just fine, it booted up TRUENAS. On this board it just did not want to boot! So I reinstalled TRUENAS on it and gave it another shot!
In the BIOS it now says: EUFI OS (P1: Kingston SV300). Now it boots right off the SSD.
I think the broken USB drive somehow held back the system, causing all sort of problems. I also ordered a 8GB Crucial for €28, for testing, now I will keep that one as a spare, just in case.
Now I can do some new testing with TRUENAS and the SATA disks....
Are any of you running a 10Gbe NIC in the PCIE-1x slot? I have a X550T1 10GBE adapter and it worked fine in a PCIE2.0 slot @x4 mode in TRUENAS.
But on this board the card is not recognized by TRUENAS and no traffic indication lights blink.
I have set the "PCI Sepress Slot Selection" to CEMx4 slot.
I also inserted a 1Gbe Intel NIC (PCIE X1) and that one just works fine.
But on this board the card is not recognized by TRUENAS and no traffic indication lights blink.
I have set the "PCI Sepress Slot Selection" to CEMx4 slot.
I also inserted a 1Gbe Intel NIC (PCIE X1) and that one just works fine.
Where is this option? I find the setup menu very confusing, I can't find that option.
I did succeed in booting a USB thumbdrive (Ubuntu 22 installer).
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Update, so i have recived my cooler master mwe 400 white psu, and..... well i'm not impressed by it. When you look at wolfgang's PSU list you can get impression that mwe 400 is as good as now discontinued corsair rm550x. But i'm experiencing different results. To be fair when i replaced my aging thermaltake toughpower 600w psu from 2008 i did manage to lower power consumption of my BKHD N100 board by like 10w. From 50 to like 40w when all my drives are spinning. But at idle i'm like i say NOT impressed. When all disks are spindown and all case fans disconnected, and only unraid usb and only my cache ssd running (that contain my dockers), with mwe i'm pulling 24W from wall, but when i tested my corsair rm850x from my main pc i manage to pull 18W from wall. (fan on corsair did not run on that low load but i dont think that this is main reason why corsair have lower power consumption)
But also i must say that with my old thermaltake toughpower 600w psu from 2008 and with this board, i did have problems spinning down first drive in my array. So this was main reason why i needed new psu. Strange that this old psu works just fine in my old unraid setup just fine, all drives was able to be power down, maybe reason is that this thermaltake is atx 2.2 standard and maybe this new boards need newer standard like 2.52.
All and all, the story goes, i'm pulling right now 30w from the wall with 3 case fans, all disks spindown and only one ssd working which is cache and dockers drive and cpu is only in C3 but this is do to jmb585 controller.
But also i must say that with my old thermaltake toughpower 600w psu from 2008 and with this board, i did have problems spinning down first drive in my array. So this was main reason why i needed new psu. Strange that this old psu works just fine in my old unraid setup just fine, all drives was able to be power down, maybe reason is that this thermaltake is atx 2.2 standard and maybe this new boards need newer standard like 2.52.
All and all, the story goes, i'm pulling right now 30w from the wall with 3 case fans, all disks spindown and only one ssd working which is cache and dockers drive and cpu is only in C3 but this is do to jmb585 controller.
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Update from my end, I went ahead and installed TrueNAS. I originally planned on going with OpenMediaVault and just mounting my mdadm array in there and being done with it. Turns out that proxmox requires a disk wipe (or a probably fragile custom fstab mount) to be able to pass the disks through.
So I decided to try running OMV bare metal, but the i226 NICs aren't recognised at install.
Since I'd have to wipe the disks for proxmox anyway, or do the alternate OMV isntall atop Debian I said sod it and went with TrueNAS which is working for now. Mostly.
Power use is still a bit of an issue but I've mostly explored all my options. I ended up scrapping my MWE400 just like @bugmenot and swapping it for the picopsu that was powering my old homelab. This saved around 2W of power. I'm not too worried about surge current since I'm running only 3 drives and the picopsu claims to be 250W. I'm powering it with a decent quality 90W brick.
The powertop is something that's being weird for me. Running powertop more than once will cause the system to go wildy unstable and eventually hang. I've no idea what's causing that but it's very frustrating.
powertop --auto-tune drops the idle power from around 32W to around 26W (with disks), so it's basically a requirement. But if I accidentally call it a second time the system freaks out. The TrueNAS web interface behaves weirdly, pages can still be browsed but nothing loads. And then eventually it goes to the " Waiting for Active TrueNAS controller to come up... " screen. Then eventually I lose connection to the SMB share I have and it never comes back (within the ~20 mins I waited).
I saw similar behaviour with proxmox, where it would tell me I had put the password in incorectly even if I hadn't (copy paste). I think that powertop is clobbering some important services somehow if it's called again.
What's really annoying is even the service has this behaviour. I set up the standard oneshot service to run on boot, but all that does is make it boot with that instability as though it's running the command repeatedly. Very weird. I messaged cwwk about this but since they never bothered to help me with the BIOS install I don't hold out much hope.
Also yeah, my HDMI port still isn't working. And if I don't boot with DP connected, I can't then connect it later (black screen). I tried installing windows like @chripo suggested but sadly it didn't fix it. It's not a major issue since I don't actually need the display. It would just be nice for debugging.
Right now I can't reccommend these boards. Once the instabilities are ironed out and there's proper documentation (other than this thread!), I think they will be a great buy. But not until then.
So I decided to try running OMV bare metal, but the i226 NICs aren't recognised at install.
Since I'd have to wipe the disks for proxmox anyway, or do the alternate OMV isntall atop Debian I said sod it and went with TrueNAS which is working for now. Mostly.
Power use is still a bit of an issue but I've mostly explored all my options. I ended up scrapping my MWE400 just like @bugmenot and swapping it for the picopsu that was powering my old homelab. This saved around 2W of power. I'm not too worried about surge current since I'm running only 3 drives and the picopsu claims to be 250W. I'm powering it with a decent quality 90W brick.
The powertop is something that's being weird for me. Running powertop more than once will cause the system to go wildy unstable and eventually hang. I've no idea what's causing that but it's very frustrating.
powertop --auto-tune drops the idle power from around 32W to around 26W (with disks), so it's basically a requirement. But if I accidentally call it a second time the system freaks out. The TrueNAS web interface behaves weirdly, pages can still be browsed but nothing loads. And then eventually it goes to the " Waiting for Active TrueNAS controller to come up... " screen. Then eventually I lose connection to the SMB share I have and it never comes back (within the ~20 mins I waited).
I saw similar behaviour with proxmox, where it would tell me I had put the password in incorectly even if I hadn't (copy paste). I think that powertop is clobbering some important services somehow if it's called again.
What's really annoying is even the service has this behaviour. I set up the standard oneshot service to run on boot, but all that does is make it boot with that instability as though it's running the command repeatedly. Very weird. I messaged cwwk about this but since they never bothered to help me with the BIOS install I don't hold out much hope.
Also yeah, my HDMI port still isn't working. And if I don't boot with DP connected, I can't then connect it later (black screen). I tried installing windows like @chripo suggested but sadly it didn't fix it. It's not a major issue since I don't actually need the display. It would just be nice for debugging.
Right now I can't reccommend these boards. Once the instabilities are ironed out and there's proper documentation (other than this thread!), I think they will be a great buy. But not until then.
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Re the energy- 6w difference is only £15 a year, less if you are in an EV tariff. Not perfect but not a deal breaker given the speed, the compact nature of the boards for me. Appreciate we are all in different financial positions though so may be more painful for others.
On the CWWK version is is under Advanced > CSM Confuguration > Boot Option Filter. I set Boot Option Filter to UEFI and Legacy. I don't know how that works on the BKHD N100 board.
Btw, TRUENAS is pulling 30-31W from the wall in idle. Using 3 HDD's, 1 SSD, 1 NVME, 3 fans.
Today i have disable in bios all pcie ports exept port1 (lan) and port7 (jmb585), but i did not get any power consumption benefits i still use 28-30W. Only difference i manage to get is when you disable port 7 cpu go to C6 insted of C3 but drives i did not unplug so thay still are spinning so to my suprise power consumption stay same when controller is disable or enable and cpu is in C3 or C6