December 30, 201213 yr I'm getting ready to start migrating to my first unRAID and have run into a weird situation: I have a 2GB Kingston Data Traveler USB stick (stick A) I just purchased a tiny Patriot Autobahn 8GB stick (stick B) - seriously so tiny I almost can't get it out of the machine! I have 2 machines: The soon to be unRAID (machine 1) Another machine on my network (machine 2) Machine 1 and machine 2 will both boot off of stick A (Kingston) and unRAID will start, and I can access it across the network to shut it back down. Machine 2 will boot off of stick B (Patriot) and start unRAID, I can access it via browser and shut it down. Machine 1 will NOT boot off of stick B. I can't provide any sort of logs, because the unRAID server never starts on machine 1, stick B, so it never produces a log. Since both machines will boot into unRAID from stick A, I don't think there's a hardware or BIOS issue causing the problem, though I'll be happy to provide specs if someone thinks that will help. I do notice that in the BIOS settings on machine 1, stick B is listed as "USB-ZIP". I did do a search in the forum, and I tried these instructions: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=18379.msg164544#msg164544, but that didn't end up helping. I found this: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=922.msg76715#msg76715, but it doesn't seem relevant, since stick A is also listed in the BIOS on machine 1 as USB-ZIP Anybody have any ideas what's going on and if there's a way to fix it? TIA FreeMan
December 30, 201213 yr Check the format type of the sticks. Maybe the 2GB is FAT and the 8GB is FAT32?
December 30, 201213 yr Check the format type of the sticks. Maybe the 2GB is FAT and the 8GB is FAT32? It entirely has to do with the ability of the BIOS on a given machine to read the flash drive. On many older machines their ability to read larger flash drives is absent since those size drives were not being produced, at the time the MB was made and the BIOS developers figured on flash drives being 512 Meg or less. (or 1Gig or less, or 2 Gig or less) See if there is an upgrade available for the BIOS on machine 1. If not, see if you can format the larger drive differently (odds are you cannot, a limitation of the FAT file-system to 2Gig max)
December 30, 201213 yr Also: google on unbootable usb drive... There are several situations where a bought flashdrive will not boot due to incompatible paritions... Can be fixed with some tricks... Personally..... I have had one of those and just bought anotherone, its quicker ;-)
December 30, 201213 yr Author Thanks for the thoughts, guys. It's not a format difference, they're both FAT32. I think Joe L is on to it. Machine 1 is about 5 years old, and just may not be able to recognize an 8GB flash drive. I wonder if I can partition the flash drive... If so, would I be able to use the 2nd partition for anything in unRAID? i.e. installing add-ons, or some sort of cache drive? If not, I guess I could use partition 1 until it failed, then create a 2nd 2GB partition and use it to boot from... This really is a tiny drive, and I'd rather not have the big one sticking out 3 inches...
December 30, 201213 yr NewEgg sells several adapters that plug into the USB headers on the motherboard and provide a standard USB socket to plug into, some of them support multiple sticks at once. I use these in several machines after having had USB sticks broken off in sockets by careless folks in my home. Since doing this I've had no more problems at all!
December 31, 201213 yr Thanks for the thoughts, guys. It's not a format difference, they're both FAT32. I think Joe L is on to it. Machine 1 is about 5 years old, and just may not be able to recognize an 8GB flash drive. I wonder if I can partition the flash drive... If so, would I be able to use the 2nd partition for anything in unRAID? i.e. installing add-ons, or some sort of cache drive? If not, I guess I could use partition 1 until it failed, then create a 2nd 2GB partition and use it to boot from... This really is a tiny drive, and I'd rather not have the big one sticking out 3 inches... don't worry about the second partition... usb sticks are not that expensive... you could use it but that would be a bad idea... it will make the flash drive prone to failure.. If you want to do that then use a second usb stick..
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