Possible to run unraid in hyperv without USB drive temporarily?

[GrantE]

I have...had...a lovely 80TB unraid server. Then my house flooded and everything is destroyed. I have backups of the config and docker containers. But it will be awhile before I have hardware to restore them to. Things are tough right now and I really want to get plex back up with a bit of content for my kid so they can have a bit of normalcy.

 

What I do have is a hyper-v server at a friend's house I can setup some VMs on with a tiny bit of storage (at least compared to the server that got flooded). Far from ideal, but better than nothing until I can get things sorted out.

 

Can I run unraid in hyperv as a VM without any USB drives, even in trial mode for a couple weeks? That would let me directly restore all the docker configurations instead of having to setup docker manually on a Ubuntu VM or something.

 

I tried the manual install instructions, mounted a VHD file, format FAT32, name it UNRAID and copy the files over etc. When I boot it, it gets to the point of "Waiting 30 seconds for device with label UNRAID to come online", but can't find the disk. I double checked and when mounting the disk it does come up as UNRAID and a FAT32 drive. So I can't get past that.

 

I can probably get them to put in a USB drive if needed for licensing the trial license or even installing to, but not sure if I can boot from that in Hyper-V on server 2019.

 

Any ideas how I can get something running temporarily? I'd be very grateful for any ideas you might have.

 

[JorgeB]

Trial still requires a flash drive.