Hello, I have posted this in hardware section as well, but figured someone might have actual experience with the mediasonic probox in here:

 

I have the HP EliteDesk 800 35W G4 Desktop Mini PC and have a problem on bootup. Whenever I have my Mediasonic Probox (HDD power enclosure) USB device attached, it will freeze the PC on bootup, sometimes for a couple minutes, sometimes until I reboot it. I have no idea what's causing this issue as it doesn't happen on any other PC, not even my beelink mini pc. I know I can set the USB to not turn on until after boot, but I'm running Unraid of course.

 

When I have it plugged in when the PC turns on, it will freeze even if I'm just at the BIOS screen. And it will either unfreeze after 3 minutes or more likely just remain frozen until I turn it off manually. I have tried every option I can think of in the BIOS and nothing helps. I have replaced the USB cable, tried different ports, tried without any hard drives inside the enclosure.

Any recommendations as this is super annoying and I will have to return this PC if this cannot be accomplished. Thanks.

 

The mediasonic box: https://mediasonicstore.com/products/mediasonic-4-bay-3-5-sata-hard-drive-enclosure-usb-3-0-esata-hf2-su3s2

9 hours ago, spike32 said:

I have tried every option I can think of in the BIOS and nothing helps.

USB boot confirm disable ?

7 hours ago, Vr2Io said:

USB boot confirm disable ?

I can't turn that off because Unraid uses USB to boot.

17 minutes ago, spike32 said:

I can't turn that off because Unraid uses USB to boot.

Oh .... Yes 😝 Is it possible disable by port or different USB controller. Pls also try assign device on different controllers and apply different BIOS setting.

 

Edit : Pls also try different USB boot emulation BIOS setting.

 

 

Edited May 16, 20242 yr by Vr2Io

56 minutes ago, Vr2Io said:

Oh .... Yes 😝 Is it possible disable by port or different USB controller. Pls also try assign device on different controllers and apply different BIOS setting.

 

Edit : Pls also try different USB boot emulation BIOS setting.

 

 

Unfortunately disabling usb ports only just disables it for good.

 

I'm not sure what you mean about the other suggestions?

Hey @spike32I have had the exact same issue as you with a probox. After having my box offline while i was overseas from a power outage I put some time into figuring it out and found a fix!!!

 

Ill give you a number of steps that I did, but it could be as simple as this one key thing.

Solution

• Switch to Legacy mode save and restart
• Go to the UEFI boot order and disable USB boot (The probox seems to come up under uefi USB boot if you remove all the hard drives and this is where its killing the HP bios. But id does not appear as a legacy boot device).
• Set your unraid USB as the primary boot device for Legacy boot.

 

More detailed steps for the bios:

 

1. Enable Legacy boot and disable secure boot
   1. Advanced > Secure boot configuration > configure legacy support
      1. Set to "Legacy support enable and secure boot disable"
      2. Save and exit to restart and go back into bios
2. Disable USB on UEFI
   1. Advanced > Boot Options > (UEFI and Legacy boot order should be available to set now)
   2. UEFI Boot Order
      1. Go into this, select USB and push f5 to disable it
   3. Legacy Boot Order
      1. Set your Unraid USB as the primary boot
3. Save and exit the bios - This should stop it from freezing up

That should fix it for you, it fixed mine. I tried a bunch of other settings as well, but doing this finally stopped it freezing up. Now I can navigate bios etc with the probox connected. 
NOTE: Bios will freeze for about 10seconds or so when the Probox starts up and scans the drives, but then it will continue.