Fallback USB boot drive/boot pool/redundancy?

[drumstyx]

I've experienced various hardware failures over the years, and they've been a pain in the arse! Not the fault of UnRAID, just because I didn't take all the precautions necessary -- failed cache, failed drives, failed USB. Thing is, I can mitigate almost everything by just having some redundancy -- dual parity, cache pool, etc. which I've now done. Got this thing almost bulletproof, but for one thing: A USB drive failure.

 

Is it possible, or are there any plans to make it possible, to have a boot pool or redundancy for the boot drive? I know that, in theory, the boot drive is only needed for power on and power off (actually, not even sure it's needed for power off?) but I do write a rotating syslog to my boot drive because it's very useful for debugging array and system bugs. I could write to an unassigned device, or the cache, but the boot drive is guaranteed to exist as long as the system is running, and if any of those other drives drop because of a system-wide failure, I don't want to lose the logs. I'm willing to sacrifice a boot drive every few years, but I'd REALLY like to not have that cause an outage for which I have to be physically present to fix.

[drumstyx]

Old, but still relevant -- bump?

[ChatNoir]

On 8/26/2022 at 6:09 PM, drumstyx said:

I do write a rotating syslog to my boot drive because it's very useful for debugging array and system bugs. I could write to an unassigned device, or the cache, but the boot drive is guaranteed to exist as long as the system is running

It is not guaranteed as faulty flashdrive do drop down, we see that on the forum regularly.

 

As for a second flashdrive, you make live with the My Servers plugin or regular backups with CA Backup / Restore Appdata.

 

However, it is not possible to have two flashdrives called UNRAID in the server. And that's required for Unraid to boot on a flashdrive.

[itimpi]

15 hours ago, ChatNoir said:

However, it is not possible to have two flashdrives called UNRAID in the server. And that's required for Unraid to boot on a flashdrive

It IS possible to boot from a drive with a different label as long as the line in syslinux/syslinux.cfg on the flash drive names the label to be used (“UNRAID” is assumed if nothing explicitly stated).  This is the technique I use to allow me to have an Unraid VM hosted on my production server (which I use for development purposes).