denishay Posted March 17, 2021 Share Posted March 17, 2021 Hi all, FYI, I made an important discovery today when updating my Unraid from 6.8.3 to 6.9.1. Right after the update, I couldn't boot on USB anymore. The USB drive wouldn't even show in the list of choices in my boot menu. I thought "OK, bad luck, the last batch of writes did it and this older USB drive is dead"... I take my backup (yes, I do backup everything, including the boot flashdrive), create a new drive... and same thing. The brand new out-of-package USB key (kept a few spares just for cases such as this one) wouldn't boot either. I will spare you the long version: it turns out that on my ancient Core i7 + Asus Maximus III combo -more than 10 years old now but running fine as my faithful Unraid- has one of the old BIOSes (pre-UEFI) that does not support showing more than 12 drives. And I recently went from 11 to 13 drives. That left no entry possible for the bootable USB drive. No USB found, no boot... So my current workaround is to remove 2 of the drives (thankfully in an easy to access 3-in-2 bay), reboot (or just boot), then add the drives again once I see the Linux log starting to show... when it finishes and Unraid starts up its web UI, etc. all the drives are there and accounted for to mount the array. So it's not 6.9.1 version related, but in case it helps others with the same problem, here was my story... very old systems might not reboot well with more than 12 drives. Quote Link to comment
John_M Posted March 17, 2021 Share Posted March 17, 2021 3 hours ago, denishay said: very old systems might not reboot well with more than 12 drives. How are the drives controlled? Presumably, with that many, you have some sort of add-in card controlling some of them? If that happens to be an LSI SAS card you might be able to get round your problem by re-flashing it with the same IT firmware it currently has but without the BIOS. The BIOS isn't needed for Unraid operation, though it can occasionally be useful for troubleshooting. Without it the card becomes very dumb and the drives are essentially invisible until the operating system loads, thereby removing all chance of booting from one of them. Quote Link to comment
denishay Posted March 20, 2021 Author Share Posted March 20, 2021 Hi John_M, Thanks for the tip. I think I'll abstain flashing the card, as I'd like to keep the option to have a BIOS with it, just in case. An upgrade of my ancient hardware is stll more than overdue. I'm just waiting for a better moment, as right now hardware prices are inflated out of proportion. It's still working... it's just that this old BIOS limitation forces me to remove 2 drives after shutdown and connect them again during boot, once Unraid starts loading. If I had to reboot my server often, I would consider the flashing operation you mention, but right now, it's a very rare occurrence for me to reboot it. Here, the excuse was the upgrade from 6.8 to 6.9 Quote Link to comment
denishay Posted March 20, 2021 Author Share Posted March 20, 2021 oh, and yes, I'm using an LSI controller with flashed IT mode bios Quote Link to comment
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