USB Kicker for booting

[PhantomD]

It seems that a majority of hardware/motherboard limits surround booting with USB.  Anyone else delve into a USB Kicker Floppy?  ie:  a floppy disk that boots, loads USB driver and kicks off the boot of UnRaid? 

 

I don't have a system - yet - but started playing around with the 3.0 beta basic.  I have an old pc I may try, but it doesn't boot a usb.  I thought I would try poking around with UnRaid under VMWare - to get a feel for it before digging out old hardware.  VMWare doesn't boot from USB either.  I found info about it at another "nas" type website of the ability to boot to Linux on a USB device from a floppy disk.  A few web searches later and some guess work tweaking  (not a linux expert by any means) and I had was running UnRaid under VMWare.

 

That was the good news - the bad news was that it appears that UnRaid doesn't support the VMWare NIC's - makes since as they are not on the hardware compat list.

 

Any options for more nic support?  I have to check out what's in my old PC to see what it even has. 

 

- P

 

 

[X4n]

well, i got unraid running under VMWare, but u will be limited to 4 drives, since VMware only supports 4 pata/sata drives

it does support scsi, but i havent been able to get a sata drive emulated on scsi.

 

for the network part, u need to (manually) set the config eth0 = 'e1000'

this will tell it to emulate a intel gigabit network.

 

since VMware doesnt usb boot either, i created a image of the usb stick with winimage, and loaded it into a virtual cd drive.

plug in the usb stick and enable it in VMware, and the server will start booting from the image in the cd-rom, and verify stuff from the usb stick

without the substick the server wont load.

 

u should try this with a real cd and try to boot it that way, maybe it works outside emulation.

writing stuff to the usbstick does prolly work cause it writes to /boot, which is mounted as sda (the usb stick)

 

for the rest its all default stuff,

[PhantomD]

Great!!!  I did not know that you could change the VMWare NIC.  I have a virtual floppy booting to the USB drive.  I am now testing.

 

- P

[tfieldho]

Can you guys give a little more info on how you got unRAID working with VMWare?  I created an IMA using WinImage and couldn't even get VMWare Server to boot off of it.  I'm doing something wrong, just not sure what.

 

Also, you mentioned editing the ethernet config... is this in a unRAID config file?  Or in VMWare setup somewhere?

 

I'd really just like to get things set up so I can play with unRAID a bit before shelling out money for a PC. 

 

thanks!