Older Motherboards - No USB Boot


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Any chance someone can just post an ISO file to save some of us the time and trouble?  I want to test the free version w/o a license.

 

I would like to just be able to download and burn and go from there.

 

What exactly would you want an ISO of?  Seems like it would be a lot more time and trouble.  Are you familiar with how UnRAID is prepared and booted?

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OK,

 

I would like a CD bootable image of what is downloaded and booted from on the flash disk.

 

In other words, if I could take my falsh disk, make an ISO of it, with the boot sector, then burn that ISO to a CD, I would be happy,  Then, I would boot the CD and install on my PC I am going to use.

 

It has a C drive ready to go, I just can;t boot to the flash devoice because it has an old BIOS.

 

THanks,

 

David

 

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Hello,

 

I got the PLOP boot manager 5, which has an ISO file that I booted to.  From there, I was able to chose my USB stick to continue booting to, which worked fine,

 

I burned the ISO which came with it, called : PLPBT.ISO

 

THat was all I needed, but a bootable install of the UnRAID would have been nice too.

 

Now I am having trouble with the CPU and I get a message saying it is not supported?  I have a 2GHz Intel Dual Core (not Core 2) from a laptop, I thought that would work?

 

David

 

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  • 2 months later...

  I agree, it does sound a little unexpected that it would not work with the Intel Core series of chips...  I am not sure, but I think it may be that the chipset and/or BIOS on your mother-board may actually be the problem.  There were some design concerns on the Core series involving compatibility, but I would not expect that to be the problem here.  I think it more likely that your BIOS and or chipset does not "fully" support the Core CPU you have.  I suspect that some of the CPU features may not be available for use with the combination of components you have.  A search for what CPUs are supported in the Slackware kernal may be in order...

 

  I bet you have already looked for the most recent BIOS, but you may want to take another look to see if you can update the BIOS, it may help.

 

  I have succesfully booted unRAID on older (if I remember release dates correctly) PIII CPUs (with the aid of a CD based boot manager - passing the boot sequence a USB FLASH drive) and not encountered any other issues other than finding usable drive interface controllers, since my OLD SCSI controllers were not supported.

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  • 1 year later...

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I have a question.  Is it possible to partition a 250GB disk with a small partition to boot from in this way?  Then I could use the rest of the disk as a drive in the array or a cache drive if I wanted to?

 

UnRAID uses first drive partitions almost exclusively, single partitions that enclose the entire drive, so no, probably not possible.  One exception, once you have allowed UnRAID to set up a Cache drive, then you could shrink the Cache partition, and add additional partitions for your own use outside of UnRAID, but that precludes any UnRAID use of the additional ones, and may also preclude booting from them.

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I don't know how to boot from a cdrom since i never find how to do it.

So, now, i boot from a HD.

 

Here's my how to :

 

1- find yourself a old HD, like 5-10 GB or less. Do not use a 1Tb since we'll only use 2 GB of it, the rest will be spoiled. Look in your garage or your neighbour's.

2- connect it to your PC. You can do it with an usb adaptor or directly on the MB.

3- make sure there's no rest of any old partition on it nor any MBR information, etc... Make it completely blank, as new. Use fdisk for that. I did it with a g-parted live disk. Delete all partitions and MBR informations.

4- make a 2GB partition. Format it in FAT16. Don't make it bootable. Don't name it UNRAID

5- apply the syslinux command to that partition as you would do to the usb flash key.

6- Copy all the usb flash key files onto the HD

7- connect the HD to your unraid machine and configure the bios to boot from that HD.

8- connect the usb flash key and boot your unraid machine.

 

The machine will boot from the HD (fast) but will mount the flash key as boot.

To be sure, i put the same files onto the HD and the flash key. When i have to change someting, i do it on both.

With Joe.L. unmenu, you can mount the HD outside the array and add or remove or replace files as you do to the flash key

 

:)

 

In case anyone else has this problem.. this technique worked perfectly for me with an IDE to Compact Flash reader and a 512MB CF Card.  Too bad I tried a bunch of other stuff before this.

Thanks jupilerman!

 

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Sorry to revive an old thread, but I have a question.  Is it possible to partition a 250GB disk with a small partition to boot from in this way?  Then I could use the rest of the disk as a drive in the array or a cache drive if I wanted to?

 

Grub4dos can boot grub from a reiserfs partition.

So with a cache drive, it's possible, however you need to know grub.

 

It's also possible to boot grub4dos with a floppy and have it read bzimage/bzroot off a reiserfs partition.

 

There's another possibility of partitioning a cache drive into multiple partitions.

 

The first partition MUST be allocated as the cache drive, the other partitions can be swap dos or something else.

 

All potential techniques, but it requires a bit of finesse to get it to work.

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