Apparently older Dell R710, R410, T420, R320, &c can work with unRAID if the UEFI is built correctly!

[princ3ssa]

I, like many others, need to use unRAID on older Dell servers. After some digging I found someone that got it to work. They said they couldn't use the normal USB boot creation tool, but instead built the bootable flash drive in Pop!_OS Linux on an old laptop.

 

This appears to be from 11 months ago. I'm not entirely sure what steps would be followed on Linux to make this work. I did install Pop!_OS 20.04 and tried the `make_bootable_linux` script from 6.8.3-x86_64, but that didn't work so I opened the script and ran the commands manually.

 

I got to the last step of inserting syslinux onto the USB and got the following output ($TARGET is /dev/sdb):

$ sudo /tmp/UNRAID/syslinux/make_bootable_linux.sh $TARGET 
INFO: Installing Syslinux bootloader on /dev/sdb1
sh: 1: mcopy: not found
INFO: Writing MBR on /dev/sdb
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
447 bytes copied, 0.00694731 s, 64.3 kB/s

INFO: the Unraid OS USB Flash drive is now bootable and may be ejected.

I also did this on a 64gb flash drive that was prepared in gparted as FAT32 on a GPT partition with the label and name both set to UNRAID.
 

Is the missing mcopy in the above message a problem? What else could be going on here?

 

I'm trying to contact the original author of that message to see if they can share exact steps, but the bottom line is that a version of Pop!_OS from at least 11 months ago was able to make a bootable version of the unRAID boot USB flash drive. This is really important and I'd like to work with anyone who may know more to get this working for everyone who needs this functionality.

 

 

 

[JorgeB]

I recently create a bug report of the issue, please add to it if you find anything that works.

[princ3ssa]

53 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

I recently create a bug report of the issue, please add to it if you find anything that works.

I'm glad you created this! The first step we need to address here is to ascertain what the method for making a bootable USB drive was 11 months ago. I wish @n1L would have documented their work more thoroughly!

 

Can you document the process of creating an unRAID USB drive from that time (11 months ago) from within Linux? 

 

From the one I had found on reddit it looks like the logical version of Pop!_OS would have been either 19.04 or 19.10 at that time....

Edited January 6, 2021 by princ3ssa