I repurposed two hard drives in my array. My system won't boot directly to the usb headless. I'm wondering if there is still boot information on these drives. Does unraid completely wipe the drive including the mbr? If not, is there a way to remove boot information from these drives if they are already in use by unraid? ie ubuntu live usb / gparted.

 

Mike

I repurposed two hard drives in my array. My system won't boot directly to the usb headless. I'm wondering if there is still boot information on these drives. Does unraid completely wipe the drive including the mbr? If not, is there a way to remove boot information from these drives if they are already in use by unraid? ie ubuntu live usb / gparted.

 

Mike

Many BIOS help you by automatically assigning the newest installed drive as the boot device.  Of course, this is not helpful in your case. 

You'll need to attach a monitor/keyboard and re-select the USB drive as your boot device.  You'll probably need to to that every time you add a new drive, regardless if it is bootable or not, re-purposed, or not.

 

When unRAID clears the drive the MBR is completely re-written.

I figured that was the issue. Unfortunately, my bios doesn't seem to have a default boot drive. I can only assign the "hard drive group" has first boot device which includes usb. The only way I can get unraid to boot is to select the boot menu during start up and select it. Unless it's just taking it's sweet time checking all the hard drives above it. I should let it sit for a few minutes and see if it eventually gets to the usb drive

 

Mike

Nevermind, I found the boot priority buried in the bios