Can someone point me to instructions on creating a backup flash drive? Searching for terms like backup, flash, and drive are not very productive as you might imagine.

 

Thanks!

Grab a flash drive, and copy the existing files from your flash drive to the new one, then run makebootable.bat on the new drive.  You cannot backup your license (if you have one) as it's tied to the GUID of the flash drive.

 

Hope that helps.

That's what I'm looking for.

 

My only other question is how do I activate my spare license on the backup drive. I purchased the license, but I need to boot my server from the drive to get the GUID to send back to unraid. Is there any chance of me losing data by booting from the "basic" backup flash drive long enough to get the GUID?

 

Thanks again!

The answer is generally, no you should not be at risk of losing data.  But if you are worried, just boot a different machine, like a laptop or desktop, and you'll be fine.

Sounds good. We'll give it a try!

I can't get either my server or my laptop to boot from this flash drive. I tried copying all of my files over, running the makebootable.bat file, as well as trying a fresh install of the basic unRAID files followed by running the makebootable.bat file.

 

Am I missing something? I'm using a new, fresh out of the box, Lexar firefly 16 GB flash drive. I know, a little overkill as far as size, but that shouldn't be a problem, correct?

Update:

 

I've tried creating the bootable USB in both a PC and a MAC (using unetbootin), but neither seems to create a bootable flash device. Is there anyway to confirm that the Flash drive is bootable independent of the OS and hardware? I guess I just want to verify that whatever the makebootable.bat script does is actually working.

 

I can read and write files to the flash drive, so there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the flash drive.

Final Update:

 

I discovered two things.

 

1) My only other windows machine will not boot from a 16 GB flash drive.

2) An 8 GB Lexar Firefly flash drive will format properly under windows, but a 16 GB Firefly flash drive has to use the HP format utility noted in this wiki post in order to make a bootable drive.

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/USB_Flash_Drive_Preparation#If_the_Flash_will_not_boot.2C_read_over_the_following_tips