emorydively

Thanks for the clarification. Just for the bump/clarification --does anyone know if it is possible to connect an Apple formatted USB drive directly to unraid?

I do have a full gigabit system. I guess that I was under the impression that even USB 2.0 still out performed gigabit in real world (not theoretical) speeds. Good to know then and it may be a moot point then since my mac can obviously transfer to the unraid regardless of the USB drive's partition scheme.

I have a large HD of 2 TB files that I want to bring over to unraid. The formatting of the drive is in Mac OS X Extended as NTFS is shaky and FAT32 doesn't support large enough file sizes for this situation. Can unraid read (not add to the array, just read) and copy data over from the USB (its USB 3.0) drive into the array? I tried to search already and either have terrible skills or only found this addressed with other partition applications.

Good you got it solved. Didn't know that board had an EFI BIOS. I am not an EFI expert, but my reading on it gives me the impression it is not a true EFI system, some sort of hybrid system. But yeah, happy it worked.

FIXED - so, unfortunately I didn't approach this scientifically... having said that.... I changed the "hybrid" EFI/BIOS to run exclusively as BIOS, and when I used my sd card with reader (on the MLB direct connections from the back of the tower) I was able to boot up properly and everything worked. I cannot tell if the "force BIOS only" mode was necessary. It SEEMS to be that the ability to format as FAT instead of FAT32 (only option for a Mac) was the difference here. So in summary. Check your EFI/BIOS hybrid settings, format as FAT not FAT32...and possibly: do it on a windows machine? Unless someone knows of a way to format as FAT in Mac OS X.

I didn't think you needed to do that if you use a Mac (being as it is a .bat file). But when I did the setup with Win 7, yes I did run the file.

Windows and Mac OS X have had no problems identifying the sd card/reader. However, I have not had luck having the BIOS of the UNRAID computer detect anything. When I get home from work today I will try out again with FAT formatted (instead of FAT32 from OS X), and done in Windows 7. Then I'll see how that goes.

That is interesting... in this case I am using a full sized card in a full sized slot. Some of these little kinks in the system should probably go to the Wiki article about USB Drive troubleshooting though.

It is a full size SD card.

I tried a different boot device. I had a 2GB USB flash drive, used a work computer with Win 7. BIOS instantly recognized it. Booting from it, I can select UNRAID or memtest. Then it loads bzimage, then bzroot... about 5 lines of ".........", then "Boot Failed: please change disks and press a key to continue". So, tomorrow I'm going to bring my usb reader and SD card and load UNRAID on it from there. Having said that, ideas why it fails the bootup process?

I am.... 'mediocre' with Linux. When I get home from work I will try this. What results would show (if that command works in Terminal) for bootable vs not bootable?

I will double check. For sure the partition is named specifically that, I wasn't aware you could rename the device.

It will probably list the USB drive as a hard-disk. Most BIOS do that when the size of the flash memory goes over 512Meg or 1Gig. Look under the list of hard disks. I don't see anything listed as a hard-disk either. Other ideas?

Just to add, since I forgot to mention this earlier. The SD card is formatted with MBR and FAT 32. And I have already verified it is named "UNRAID".

I have a new setup using a Gigabyte 78LMT-S2P. I can't see any sign in the "BIOS" that it sees the USB SD card plugged into an SD card reader. I have tried using different USB ports. I am using a Mac to setup the SD card. The SD card is 4GB Kingston with a Kingston MobileLiteG2 as the reader. I am attempting to use 5.0b12, but I don't think that has anything to do it with since it appears to not even be getting to the contents of the card. Error message "Missing operating system" or sometimes it is just stuck at "Verifying VMI Data pool...". ---edit--- Added my discoveries below. FIXED - so, unfortunately I didn't approach this scientifically... having said that.... I changed the "hybrid" EFI/BIOS to run exclusively as BIOS, and when I used my sd card with reader (on the MLB direct connections from the back of the tower) I was able to boot up properly and everything worked. I cannot tell if the "force BIOS only" mode was necessary. It SEEMS to be that the ability to format as FAT instead of FAT32 (only option for a Mac) was the difference here. So in summary. Check your EFI/BIOS hybrid settings, format as FAT not FAT32...and possibly: do it on a windows machine? Unless someone knows of a way to format as FAT in Mac OS X.