gabrieljordan

Ok... just to close the loop for those that are curious:
 
I took the original drive and backed it up. I then erased it and put a fresh install on it as suggested by @itimpi. 
 
It still failed to boot. Said non-bootable. (Just for posterity: this was an 8Gb drive that Apple used to package with Macs as the 10.6 install disc. I work in IT and at once point had literally hundreds of these, and there was a way to wipe them and just use them as thumb drives... and none had never given me issues before. But apparently this HPE Server just really didn't like that drive).
 
So I found an old 4GB SanDisk Cruiser drive my wife had laying around from 2008. I flashed it... and it booted. So I copied the config folder backup onto it... and it failed to boot but with a different error... but booted again on second attempt. 
 
So I start trying to get things set up and reboot the server again, and it fails to boot again. I'm chalking that up to the stupid "U3 System" that was still riding on that old drive; I have no windows PC around so no great way to remove that bs...
 
So I say screw it and put it on the SD card... but the HPE Server card readers are all blacklisted by unRAID.
 
So I eventually gave up and had Walmart 1hr deliver a new flash drive.
 
Flash, restore backup... and I'm finally in business. 
 
Thanks for all the help.