I'm coming to the end of my trial activation and will definitely be buying a license but have been having some boot issues I was hoping for a little assistance with.

 

I am using a Netgear ReadyNAS RN524X chassis, which has had very little use - maybe two weeks powered on in total since it was purchased.

 

That will boot fine from hard disk and SATA DOM but when booting from the PNY Attaché 4 64GB USB 3.1 flash drive I bought to use for Unraid, booting from cold is roughly 50% successful. When it does not boot, the device goes straight into the BIOS and can not see the drive attached.

 

The device is capable of WOL without having any plugins installed, and wakes from the power off state. When performing a WOL, the drive is not seen and the device goes straight to BIOS 100% of the time.

 

No change made to BIOS settings has any effect - after saving the device will boot from the flash drive again, but if then shut down and powered on by WOL it is not seen and if powered on using the power switch is 50% successful.

 

Experimenting with a few other devices they always seem to be seen. I went with this particular flash drive because the manufacturer seemed to be recommended by others and it was a good price.

 

Has anyone had any experience with these or could recommend any other makes/models I could try? I'm in the UK so a lot of the recommended models seem to either be unavailable here or ridiculously expensive.

I have noticed that removing the flash drive from the USB port and plugging it back into the same port when the device is powered on or off fixes the issue and the device will boot correctly the next time. Almost as if the flash drive needs to see that the power has been cut before it will be available to boot from again.

Make sure fast boot or any similar feature is disabled in the board BIOS.

Hi Jorge,

Thanks for your reply, that is definitely disabled.

You can try another flash drive, if the same it's likely a board issue.

Hi Jorge,

I have tried a few flash drives now and found a Kingston one that appears to rectify this issue.

Many thanks for your assistance.