I am brand new to this, so please bear with me.

I tried the online installer but it didn't like my usb stick so I found the alternative (manual) way to get a bootable stick.

That worked fine and I can boot the computer to a CLI prompt and I can login as root.

Following the instructions, I tried to boot to a GUI, both regular and safe mode but neither worked. It looks as if it is trying to start the xserver but then just sits there with a blinking cursor in the top left.

I am able to open a new tty, login as root and reboot.

I am trying to set up my old HP Z420 Workstation with Unraid. It has a Xeon v2, 64GB ram and an Nvidia 1050ti GPU. Currently it has 2 small SSDs with TrueNAS installed, a 3 drive ZFS pool and a couple of other drives that aren't relevant here. Obviously, I want to be able to boot a GUI so that I can look at the system. Once I find that I can use Unraid, assuming I do, then the TrueNAS setup will be replaced and some larger drives added. I am just experimenting at the moment to see which system suits me best. FWIW, the TrueNAS setup works fine but I only have storage set up, no apps or VMs.

I also tried to boot my desktop from the Unraid USB and got the same result. I have looked through the log file but can't see anything wrong.

My desktop is a Xeon v3, 24GB ram and an Nvidia 3060 and has 2 bootable btrfs drives but this was just to test, I have no intention of running Unraid on there.

Lastly, I tried booting 2 laptops and failed miserably. These have ext4 formatted drives with Linux and I saw on the screen that ext4 is not recognized. They both triggered a timeout that said they couldn't access /dev/... I guess because of the format? Anyway, they don't matter, it was just a test.

Do you know any reason that will prevent the system booting to a GUI? I have re-downloaded the zip file and re-written the USB drive but that didn't change anything.

GUI mode doesn't work with some hardware, but that is typically only used for troubleshooting. Normally you access the GUI from another computer/device on your network, under http:\\tower.local or the IP.

I did try tower.local but got address not found. I'm looking through the log files and I can see why the GUI failed to start - modules not found etc.
OK, I have web access using the IP, tower.local just says server cannot be found.
I will go through the guide now that I have access.

Edited August 20Aug 20 by colins2
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