I built my first UNRAID setup last night 

I used a gigabyte GA-945GZM-S2, with a Kingston mini Fun flash (because its tiny).

After a little fiddling, and using the HP formatter, and the -ma switch for syslinux, I got it all working.

The set started each time no problems.

I then formatted the first disk in the array, and set up the shortcuts. No problem. Copied a load of test data. all fine.

I then poweded down the server and moved it into a different position, and it will not start.

The boot procedure does not seem to load the OS, although the data on the screen shows the flash being present.

I have reformatted the flash in case of corruption. No help.

Do some flashs work in a hit and miss fashion, or should it work consistantly once setup and running?

 

Thanks.

Many motherboard BIOS's will reset their boot order when the detected hard disks connected to them change.  It might be as easy as going into its BIOS and re-selecting the flash drive as the boot device.  Unfortunately, on a few older motherboards, you will need to reselect the flash drive as the boot device every time you reboot.

 

Another possibility, since you said it failed to boot after you moved it, perhaps a loose connector, or interface board, or RAM is not seated properly and was dislodged in the move. 

 

Since the flash drive has already booted successfully, the odds are you do not need to do anything more to it.  (I know you said you already reformatted it... make sure you set the volume label on it to UNRAID again too)

 

Do not rule out marginal memory.  A bad RAM stick will cause all kinds of grief.  Can you get at all to the unRAID boot menu?  Do you see it at all?  As I said, to help you further, we need more information as to how far you are getting.

 

One other possible issue would be if the flash drive was a USB 1.0 device and was marginally booting at a 2.0 speed, or some weird interrupt conflict.  We would need to know more of what you see on the screen when it fails to boot to guide you in that situation.

 

Joe L.

 

Thanks for the helpful suggestions.

I tried the physical connections  but no change. For some reason, the bios just did not get to the Flash boot section.

In the end, I unplugged the HDD, so it could only go to flash, and it started to work again. So now I am running!

 

That seems to confirm it is a BIOS setting and you did not have the flash drive selected as the boot device, or perhaps the hard disk was first in the boot device order.

 

Joe L.

I agree with Joe.  My current unRAID is using the exact same mobo as you, with no problems whatsoever.  Go into the BIOS and move the flash to the top of the hard drive priorities.  I can't remember, but you might need to redo this each time you add a new hard drive.

Happened to me yesterday after I moved my unRaid server and for some reason the bios changed. I spent hours trying to get it to work and reformatted my flash, but in the end it was  the bios settings.