"Not a bootable disk" on HPE MicroServer Gen 8

[gabrieljordan]

Tearing my hair out here. Been running unRAID on an old Dell tower for a year now and just picked up an HP ProLiant Microserver Gen 8 I was going to move the array over. Whenever I put the unRAID usb drive in to boot, it says "This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a bootable floppy and press any key to try again..."

 

I have put USB at the top of the boot order in BIOS, and I have forced to boot/manually selected USB, so don't let the "floppy" term confuse you. 

 

The USB key continues to boot on the old Dell just fine. 

 

I popped it in my Mac and re-ran the "Make bootable" executable just for giggles. No change.

 

I had an old microSD card hanging around and put the demo/trial version of unRAID on that and popped it in the server and it boots right up no issues. So I know the HP Server *can* boot to unRAID... it's just not liking something about the install on my USB drive.

 

Any help is appreciated.

[JorgeB]

Can only tell that many users are using the same server with Unraid, so not a model issue, can you boot any other flash drive using that server? Also did you try UEFI boot?

[itimpi]

7 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Also did you try UEFI boot?

Make sure that the EFI folder on the flash drive does not have a trailing character (if so remove it to enable UEFI boot).    I think the latest Unraid release has UEFI boot enabled by default whereas earlier releases did not.

[gabrieljordan]

Sorry; I should have included this in the original post:

 

-I have tried the USB drive in 3 different USB 2.0 ports

 

-I have tried leaving the folder as EFI as it is for the dell and tried renaming it to _EFI

 

-I have successfully booted Linux Mint over USB

[JorgeB]

12 minutes ago, gabrieljordan said:

and tried renaming it to _EFI

Not sure what the problem is but FYI, doing this won't change anything, you can always have the EFI folder to allow UEFI boot, then in the board BIOS you choose if you want to boot legacy or UEFI, assuming the board supports both, it can still boot legacy with the EFI folder.

[gabrieljordan]

Hm. I'll have to explore more this evening when I'm back on site with the server. I could find nothing in BIOS menus about enabling UEFI vs Legacy Boot when I looked. I *did* see it through HP's "Intelligent Provisioning" panel, and it was set to Legacy Boot with UEFI grayed out as an option/unable to be selected, which I was confused about.

 

But, again, I was able to boot a fresh install of unRAID from the SD card, so I tossed it up to being inconsequential at that point.

 

Also note I have fully updated the USB key (6.12.8).

Edited February 29 by gabrieljordan

[gabrieljordan]

Alright, from what I'm reading from HP directly and random other forums, Gen8 only supports legacy boot, not UEFI. 

 

So would I need to somehow "disable" UEFI on the USB drive... or should the system just ignore that parameter regardless?

 

 

 

[itimpi]

8 minutes ago, gabrieljordan said:

or should the system just ignore that parameter regardless?

It should just ignore it.

[itimpi]

You could always backup the flash drive to your PC and then put a fresh install of Unraid to prove that or boots up OK.    If it does you can then copy the ‘config’ folder from the backup you have just made (which contains all your settings and your licence key) overwriting the config folder contents on the flash drive.

[gabrieljordan]

Ok... just to close the loop for those that are curious:

 

I took the original drive and backed it up. I then erased it and put a fresh install on it as suggested by @itimpi. 

 

It still failed to boot. Said non-bootable. (Just for posterity: this was an 8Gb drive that Apple used to package with Macs as the 10.6 install disc. I work in IT and at once point had literally hundreds of these, and there was a way to wipe them and just use them as thumb drives... and none had never given me issues before. But apparently this HPE Server just really didn't like that drive).

 

So I found an old 4GB SanDisk Cruiser drive my wife had laying around from 2008. I flashed it... and it booted. So I copied the config folder backup onto it... and it failed to boot but with a different error... but booted again on second attempt. 

 

So I start trying to get things set up and reboot the server again, and it fails to boot again. I'm chalking that up to the stupid "U3 System" that was still riding on that old drive; I have no windows PC around so no great way to remove that bs...

 

So I say screw it and put it on the SD card... but the HPE Server card readers are all blacklisted by unRAID.

 

So I eventually gave up and had Walmart 1hr deliver a new flash drive.

 

Flash, restore backup... and I'm finally in business. 

 

Thanks for all the help.