Have been using 5.12 for a while with no problems. Decided to upgrade to 5.13 today. Did a clean power down. Removed flash drive and copied the updated 5.13 files and re-booted. System got stuck at flashing cursor before unraid started. Checked BIOS to ensure flash drive was boot drive. Tried flash drive in other USB port. No luck. Copied 5.12 files back on and tried that. Still nothing.

 

Removed flash drive and copied files. Reformatted flash drive, copied files back on and made bootable. Still can't get past blinking cursor.

 

I have searched the forums and can't find anything that seems applicable to my situation or that might help. I am running on a Supermicro X7DB8-X if that gives anyone any clues.

 

Any and all advice much appreciated. I am very depressed without my server running  :'(

Run the make_bootable batch file.

Already tried that. Didn't make any difference.

Run the make_bootable batch file.

 

right click & run it as administrator?

"... Removed flash drive and copied the updated 5.13 files and re-booted. "  ==>  This is a frequent cause of an unbootable flash drive.    Basically you need to rerun syslinux with the appropriate parameters;  but this is much simpler with the AIO releases ==> just run the "makebootable.bat" file ... but as noted above you have to right-click and select "Run as Administrator" for it to work correctly.

 

You could have avoided this by simply copying bizroot and bizimage directly to the flash drive while UnRAID was active;  then just doing a reboot.

 

Note:  If that's not the issue, then you don't have the BIOS set correctly to boot from the USB flash drive.    This can be a bit tricky on some systems ... sometimes you set the USB device as the first boot device;  on other systems you have to set it to boot from the hard drive as the first boot device, and then set the USB flash drive as the first hard drive on a separate menu that defines the hard drive order.

 

You can test whether the USB flash is bootable on any other system by just selecting it from your boot menu ... if it starts to boot you know it's okay (just power off before it completes).  Then if it doesn't start to boot on your UnRAID box you know it's a BIOS boot order problem.

 

Thanks for the tips. I had already run the makebootable.bat as Administrator.

 

By a process of elimination it seems that (a) either my flash drive is corrupt or (b) my BIOS is set wrong. I will take the suggestion of trying to boot the flash drive on another system to see if that works. As for the BIOS, I previously set it correctly and don't recall having to do anything too complicated. This time I could just be having a brain fart but I don't see any other settings or boot options that I could use to make the flash drive bootable.

 

Good to know that in future I don't need to remove the flash drive and copy the bizroot and bizimage files on my windows PC. That would have saved a lot of drama this time if I knew that!

Simple fact:  If you're not seeing the initial screen where you get to choose between UnRAID and MemTest, then you are NOT booting to the flash drive.  It's a virtual certainty that your BIOS is not set to boot to the correct device.

 

Does your system have a hot-key-invocable boot menu?  [Often F12, ESC, or F10]  If so, try using that, and confirm that (a) the USB flash is listed; and (b) that if you select it then it boots okay.    That doesn't fix the issue (you NEED the default to be correct), but it would at least confirm that your flash drive is okay.    Or simply boot it on ANY PC (your main desktop is fine -- you're not going to do anything) ... and select the MemTest boot option (it's quicker).

 

Finally got home so I could try out these ideas!

 

I removed the flash drive and tried to boot from it on another computer. The boot sequence got as far as showing "SYSLINUX 3.72 2008-09-25 EBIOS Copyright....." and stopped there with a blinking cursor. The only difference on this boot compared to the one on my Unraid machine is the SysLinux message above. Does this more likely mean that my flash drive is corrupted somehow?

 

My next thought would be to try to boot my unraid machine from a different flash drive but won't I run into a license key problem as well as configuration issues?

Yay! Fixed it!

 

I re-formatted the flash drive. Downloaded rc13 again. Copied everything from the download plus the previous config folder from the flash drive. Made bootable. Plugged in the flash drive, turned on the unraid machine and prayed. Booted perfectly!

 

Thanks for the help and suggestions!

Glad it's all resolved.

 

BTW you're correct that you could not boot with a different flash drive, as the key is tied to your specific unit.    You could use another one to confirm that yours is bad (i.e. if it boots, but yours doesn't with exactly the same preparation you'd know you had a problem) ... but it would only be a "Basic" system and you couldn't load your current config on it.