princ3ssa

CRAZY: I had a miraculous break through as well. I kept trying to use UEFI, but when I made the unRAID 6.9-rc2 image with the Unraid Flash Drive Tool and as BIOS and CHANGED my R710 to BIOS instead of UEFI it booted this time! I know I've read somewhere where using BIOS instead of UEFI for R/710 is a bad idea (whether for drives space, which apparently is false for an HBA controller; or for some other reason, I do not recall).

Hoping for some more details from @n1L following my example format above, but no word yet... The key here is that we lock into a reproducible process. I'm hearing that one other R710 user has been able to use the existing Unraid tool to make BIOS boot USB flash drives successfully that boot...

Alright, so this is making some more sense, but can you give some explicit stepwise instructions as to what you did? I tried with both "Allow UEFI Boot" and not with it. So here for example are my steps that I tried (that have not worked): 1) insert flash drive into Windows computer 2) run Unraid USB Flash Creator with these settings (this is for the MBR/BIOS attempt that also failed): 3) took USB flash drive out of Windows computer 4) inserted USB flash drive into Linux computer (Pop!_OS in this case) 5) wrote your MBR image with this command: sudo dd if=MBR_HardDisk4.dat of=/dev/disk/by-label/UNRAID bs=446 count=1 6) took out USB flash drive 7) inserted USB flash drive into R710 with BIOS boot turned on 8 ) started R710 server and waited for it to try to boot - failure to detect a boot device.

So @n1L you're using an MBR/BIOS boot and not GPT/UEFI boot on the Dell server? If so, do you not have the 2TB drive size limit that Dell warns about? I think the Dell support people who said this were wrong in saying the limits affect Windows and Linux and maybe it's only Windows....

Another option that seems to be working from someone might be using Rufus. I don't have the details yet, but since recent Rufus has syslinux 6.04 it might work?

Can you confirm if you used syslinux 6.04 successfully or does it have to be a newer version compiled from the git source?

@n1L and anyone else working on this, there is serious interest in addressing this and fixing this bug/inadequacy of unRAID (see bug report and post: ) Could you please either 1) document the process of creating the USB in Linux with details or 2) share a currently bootable version of the image that we can test and dissect? It appears the most recent version of syslinux is 6.04 from https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/Testing/ but I don't see any beta here. (Changelog) There might be some new development here: https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Development but I don't know how to compile that to be used in our case. I believe the developers will implement the fix if we can get sufficient details and steps here.