Hello everyone. I've had an unraid server mostly for storage and plex running for a number of years now. Decided to upgrade my hardware so I picked up the Asus Pro WS W680-ACE SE (m-atx version) along with a 13500 and ECC ram. Readying it bit it seemed all I needed to do was swap everything over. Well I built the computer, swapped the drives over, but I keep getting a screen that says "Configuring firmware is in progress... Importing firmware configuration settings from OData server." then it puts my straight into bios. As far as I can tell everything in bios seems right. All my drives are there, boot usb is detected and set to boot, mem and cpu all showing correct figures, but I simply can't get it to boot to the flash drive. Every setting I try is a rinse and repeat of the above screen and back into bios. Just to make sure my usb stick wasn't damaged i tossed it back into the old comp with no drive and it booted straight to unraid no problem so i know the drive is good and its bootable. Anyone have any ideas?

sounds like you bought this system used... right? If so, sounds like it was setup to pull it's config from some where else... since you dont have that it spits you out at the bios...

 

IMO... reset the bios, RAID controller... everything... Always reset everything when buying used

MB was bought new via amazon. CPU and memory was bought new via newegg

1 hour ago, mathomas3 said:

reset the bios

Try this then update it.  Then verify the boot settings; I typically disable every option for boot other than the USB drive. 

 

Reset to default multiple times. The only boot drive in the machine is the usb. I installed 2 new M.2's but they haven't been formatted or anything yet and not bootable/no os. HD's for the array are all unplugged as of now. Didn't want them connected with all my data while i'm messing around with it/concerned I might have a bad MB. Updated to latest MB bios as well. 

 

Still the same thing. I've tried every combo of boot option I could. I can see the flash drive and even see the files on it. I also tossed in an old windows 10 install USB. Same deal, can't seem to get it to boot to anything but bios

Hmm so I might have found the problem. It seems to boot to a MBR disc I need to have CSM enabled. Problem is I can't enable CSM with iGPU enabled. I plan to use the iGPU for plex transcoding so disabling it is not an option. I'll pull an old GPU out of another computer and use that and disable iGPU and see if that confirms this issue. 

 

Is it possibly to update the unraid boot drive to GPT to allow booting without CSM assuming this is the issue?

got it.

 

wow after all of that, all I ended up doing was removing the - key at the end of the EFI folder on the boot disk to allow it to load UEFI mode. Need to do some tinkering tomorrow to get the new cache drives going but its loaded!

I'm glad you got that sorted.  Sounds like a setup that will be fun to tinker with.

On 12/9/2024 at 9:52 PM, Steve Welsh said:

got it.

 

wow after all of that, all I ended up doing was removing the - key at the end of the EFI folder on the boot disk to allow it to load UEFI mode. Need to do some tinkering tomorrow to get the new cache drives going but its loaded!

You are my hero! I just built a new rig with this same motherboard and I've been struggling with this issue for HOURS. Finally found this thread, removed the "-" from the EFI folder name, and BAM it works. Thank you so much my friend!