I'm using an older system to try unraid.  The system is a MSI z97 Gaming5 Motherboard with an i5-4690K CPU and 16 GB of ram.  I have a 9207-8i PCIE3.0 6Gbps HBA card installed with no harddrives attached right now. 

I have been trying to boot using a USB.  I first tried using mini SD card reader and a 16 GB SD card.  I used windows to write the image and it did boot into unraid and I was able to get logged in.  The USB drive was blacklisted and after some investigation I determined that this was because of the card reader and I really needed a usb stick. I found a 32 GB microcenter usb stick (which seems to be the max allowed) I wrote the image using the same Windows software, installed the stick in the same usb slot and now it will not recognize it as a boot drive.  I have tried to write the image several times, ran the script to make it a bootable drive but no luck. Moved the usb stick to multiple different usb locations all on the motherboard (not the case usb drives).  I have reviewed the bios setting, fast boot is not enabled, legacy usb support is enabled.  I can't find anything like boot order of Forced-FDD, USB-HDD, USB-ZIP. 

I have a monitor attached and I can see the HBA card boot, it complains that it is not able to find a bootable drive then continues on.  Then I get the BIOS message not bootable drive. I look in the BIOS I see one usb highlighted in the boot order

When I look in the BOIS it is seeing the USB as a PMAP drive not a UEFI drive.  Is that the cause of it not being able to boot?  Is this because of the size of the usb stick, the make of the usb stick?

If I use belana etcher to write ubuntu, the system boots from the usb stick.  Maybe it is not the USB stick but the software that is writing to the usb stick?

This is really frustrating as I have spent several hour just trying to get a working install. 

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

I have a older system that I'm trying to boot from USB.  The system is a MSi X97 Gaming 5, core i5 4690K with 16 GB of ram, an older graphics card  and a 9207-8i PCIE3.0 6Gbps HBA installed (no drives).

I created a boot image on windows using the unraid imager.  The USB stick is a 32 GB microcenter usb (maximum allowable I believe).  When I plug this into the motherboard usb slot, the system is unable to find and boot from the USB stick.  I have tried creating this several times, also tried to change the BIOS settings for boot order.  Validated a number of BIOS settings legacy usb support is enabled, fast boot is disabled.  I have tried to manually create an image and I have the same problem.

If I flash this USB stick with ubuntu 24 using balena etcher and put it in the same usb slot it immediately boots to the usb and gives me the try ubunutu grub entries.

 

What am I doing wrong with unraid?  This is supposed to be an easy process but it has taken hours of troubleshooting and nothing works.

Are you trying to boot in legacy (CSM) mode or UEFI mode?   If the latter make sure there is no trailing ~ character on the EFI folder on the flash drive.

Thanks seems like it is a bad usb stick.  Windows will no longer format the usb drive "Can't find file."

I tried to format the usb stick to start all over again and it seems like windows does not want to fomat it.  Likely a faulty usb stick.