After recovering from a corrupt file on my USB stick (a cheap no-brand that's been going strong for many years) I decided it's probably time to swap it for something better.

So I downloaded the Unraid USB Creator.

Every single USB stick I own was flagged as "blacklisted" including branded and unbranded ones. So I ordered one of the few USB 2.0 drives available (from PNY a reputable brand, I thought, who's products I have used many times). NOPE. "blacklisted"!

Can someone recommend - or is there a list of - currently available USB 2.0 drives that are NOT blacklisted?

Thanks all!

24 minutes ago, malebron said:

is there a list of - currently available USB 2.0 drives that are NOT blacklisted?

"Blacklisted" in this case likely means the flash drive does not have a unique GUID. They probably just have a generic GUID for all their devices.

The last flash drive I bought for Unraid (has a unique GUID) is this cheap HP 2.0 USB flash drive

Edited October 16, 2025Oct 16 by Hoopster

Have you tried to manually create the USB? The Usb creator tool isn't the best and sometimes has "false blacklists"

The latest tool should allow you to continue even if it thinks the flash drive is blacklisted; you can then boot Unraid to confirm, i.e, if starting a trial fails, it really was.

Thanks guys.

I'm only using the tool to identify a valid drive I can move my existing Unraid installation to safely. Trial installation and test booting each one would be even more effort.

I realize these things are only a few dollars each, but I'd rather just buy one that's known to work, rather than spend hours buying and testing a whole bunch.

I'm actually surprised that there's not a list of "known good drives with unique GUIDs" to help newcomers. (If there is, please point me in the right direction!)

99% of the flash drives should work. There were a few SanDisk fakes being sold some time ago without unique GUIDs (0000-000-000SANDISK) or something like that), but that should not happen when buying from a reputable site, though the USB tool can still incorrectly flag some GUIDs as blacklisted, so you cannot really use that as a test.

Of the 10 or so sticks I tested so far (all "blacklisted") all have legit looking GUIDs. Some old, some new, some branded , some not.

My assumption was that the tool checks whether the GUID has already been registered with Unraid (presumably because some lazy manufacturer used the same GUID for a batch). Is this not true?

Unfortunately I don't have a spare machine to test boot with right now (or the time), so I guess I'll keep backing up and wait till it fails.

There has got to be a better way.

Thanks for the info.

1 hour ago, malebron said:

Of the 10 or so sticks I tested so far (all "blacklisted") all have legit looking GUIDs

Not necessarily for you but for others who find this thread and want to check if a USB flash drive has a unique GUID, you can check that in Windows by running CMD and then typing diskpart

In diskpart do the following:

1- list disk (this lists all disks in the system)

2- select disk # (where # is the disk number of the disk you want to check; 5 in this example)

3- uniqueid disk (shows the GUID of the disk)

I did this to check the GUID on a flash drive I am not using with Unraid but to see what its GUID is. The last 24 characters highlighted in yellow are what Unraid would see as the GUID.

Edited October 20, 2025Oct 20 by Hoopster

8 hours ago, malebron said:

My assumption was that the tool checks whether the GUID has already been registered with Unraid (presumably because some lazy manufacturer used the same GUID for a batch). Is this not true?

It does, but there are also some false positives, though it seems strange that you would get that with so many flash drives. There may be some other issue with the desktop you are using, extremely unlike that all those flash drives will have a blacklisted GUID, easy test is to boot one of them and try to start a trial.

P.S. if you like, DM me one or two GUIDs and I can find out whether they are really blacklisted or not.