Currently, I'm running the latest version on Unraid with 4 WD 2TB drives (EARS, jumpered as I was using an older version of Unraid) and things are going just fine. I cleared off an old 750G WD drive (wd7500aads, no jumpers), shut down the server, connected the drive, booted up but get no Unraid. Just a blinking cursor. Nothing boots. I pull the drive and reboot, things boot normally.

 

The BIOS (Asus M4A785-M board) sees the drive, board POSTs fine and the drive behaves normally on my desktop. (Used an eSATA cradle to move off what I wanted, removed old partitions, etc.) I've tried both the remaining two SATA ports on my server with the same results.

 

Anyone out there have some ideas?

 

Thanks in advance!!

Sounds like adding the new drive changing your boot order. Go back into bios and confirm that it is set to boot from USB, make sure to do this after connecting the new hard drive

Influencer is right.  I used to have an unRAID server based on that same motherboard but switched away from it because the order would get change whenever a drive was added or removed.  Major PITA.

Influencer is right.  I used to have an unRAID server based on that same motherboard but switched away from it because the order would get change whenever a drive was added or removed.  Major PITA.

Many BIOS act this way.  Only a PITA when adding new drives if you don't expect it.  Personally, I'd never change out a MB because of it, as I infrequently add disks.

Seems the issue was me.

 

I did check the boot order, making sure that only the USB drive was listed, but noticed the motherboard had the SATA ports set to IDE, not AHCI. Changed that, problems went away.