Hello,  I’ve using UNRaid 4.7 with Plus key since 2011 with zero problems and been very happy with the performance.  Recently I wanted to start going beyond 2TB drives so I bought a 4TB and wanted to change out my old 2TB Parity drive to allow going larger on the storage drives.  I do have a complete backup copy of my USB boot device for reference.

 

So I decided to migrate to the newest release 5.0.4.i386 before doing any adding of drives or going from 2 to 4 TB on my valid Parity drive. 

 

To play it safe I went ahead and formatted my original bootable USB drive (a Kingston DataTraveler 101 2GB, the one I’ve been using since 2011) from my XP Pro SP 3 machine and when I try to run the make_bootable.bat file from the thumb drive it doesn’t look like the batch file completes, I see:

F:\syslinux.exe –ma F:

Could not write the whole boot sector

Press any key to continue . . .

 

What am I missing, I’ve tried everything I can think of and looked for hours over several days at all the Wiki entries and can’t seem to find anything referencing this make bootable failure issue and I know it’s something completely stooped?

 

 

rbevco

Do a long format on the flash drive.

Thanks for the post.

 

In looking through a bunch of other posts where folks had issues with getting the “makebootable” process to run or getting a known good flash drive to boot on a particular MB, I noticing that they mentioned that often it can be a problem if the PC you are performing the process on (to make a bootable USB drive) has many other USB drives attached.

 

Previously I’d tired formatting the USB flash drive as all possible variables; FAT, FAT32, and slow or slow formatting but it still gave me the previously mentioned error message.  By eliminating all other USB devices on the PC and just putting the same previously unbootable USB flash drive with the same file structure onto one of my laptops with very few USB devices attached or enabled, the makebootable batch file ran flawlessly on the first attempt and I now have the flash drive running 5.0.4-i386 booted and running a parity check on my server hardware. Everything looks ok now. 

 

Thanks again for your post.

 

I've run into problems off and on with bootable USB drives.  Most recently, I was trying to experiment around with OpenSuse, and couldn't find a spare thumb drive at the time, so I repurposed my unRaid stick temporarily to use.  After I was done, I reformatted the thumb drive, ran MakeBootable, and no matter what it refused to boot at all.

 

I figured that somehow or somewhere the boot sectors got messed up and syslinux couldn't set it up correctly.

 

I finally got everything working (along with a number of other sticks I have found that I couldn't set up to boot with any OS) by first using Active Boot Disk creator (do a web search - 30 day trial version available on it)

 

After using it to setup a DOS boot disk, I could then set it up as a boot disk for anything (unRaid, Arch, OpenSuse, OpenElec, etc) without any issues.