I have to admit, I'm equal parts baffled and frustrated by this one. My Unraid server has claimed another USB flash drive (this Samsung Bar lasting all of 3 months, the 4th drive in just 6 years), and for some reason I can't seem to make another bootable drive.

 

Objective:
-Install Unraid 6.11.5 (yes, it's behind, couldn't update it after my replacement USB was somehow corrupted right off the bat) on a USB DOM to hopefully be rid of this infuriating issue of USB drives dying at inopportune times.

 

Things I've tried:
-Used 2 different PCs running different flavors of Linux to configure the DOM boot device manually, following the guide on the website. All attempts result in a device that doesn't show up as a UEFI device in the bootloader menu, despite specifically enabling EFI in the install process. Selecting the "legacy USB device" results in a message about no bootable OS being found.
-Used a third different PC running Windows with the USB creator tool. Used the new (to me) USB DOM (8GB ATP unit), and also tried another 32GB Samsung Bar and both attempts also resulted in devices that were only recognized as legacy USB devices with no bootable OSes to be found.
-Have tried booting on my regular server and on a Dell Inspiron laptop, and it's the same result.

 

I have to be missing something, right? I've installed probably about 20 OSes on various VMs and other bare metal systems just this year, and this has, by far, been the worst experience. Maybe it's just the fact that there's a 100TB hole crippling my homelab because of a stupid flash drive.

Check if there's a EFI- or EFI folder.

It's EFI, I forgot to specify that, but it was why I was confused it showed up as a legacy USB device.

Anything else I can check?

 

Edit: MD5 also matched on the copy of 6.11.5 downloaded.

Edited July 3, 20242 yr by Valorum

That looks OK, you can try using the manual method to create a flash drive, and if it still doesn't work try to test in a non Dell PC to make sure the flash itself is working, Dell can have issues, at least for some users.

 

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/getting-started/manual-install-method/

Thanks for the help, @JorgeB. I sent a small donation for your efforts. You were right about the issue being with the Dell for test booting. I tried it on a consumer Asus board and it worked fine in UEFI mode. It wouldn't boot in UEFI on the Dell Latitude, or on my Supermicro GPU server, or the Gigabyte server board I've been using for Unraid.

After trying several other things, I tried the legacy USB creation tool and it defaults to leaving the folder as EFI- and on a whim I tried that, and it boots on all the platforms just fine.

The part that really has me confused is I went back and checked the backup of the dead USB I made before all of this, and sure enough, the folder is just EFI, so previously my Gigabyte board did work in UEFI mode, and now it doesn't? I made the previous EFI USB on Linux manually, and was not able to reproduce that success this time with any tool. I'm not sure what changed.

2 minutes ago, Valorum said:

The part that really has me confused is I went back and checked the backup of the dead USB I made before all of this, and sure enough, the folder is just EFI, so previously my Gigabyte board did work in UEFI mode, and now it doesn't? I made the previous EFI USB on Linux manually, and was not able to reproduce that success this time with any tool. I'm not sure what changed.

Not necessarily.   Having the EFI folder does not mean you DID boot in UEFI mode, just that you could if the motherboard supports it.   It does not disable the option of legacy booting.