Well this seems to have recently cropped up.  I have an ASUS MB and, when I first got it, I really had to play with the BIOS settings to get it to boot from USB with SATA drives plugged in.  It worked for a while (automatically) but now its stopped working.  When I reboot my server, I have to plug in a kb/monitor and press F8, then select the USB device.  I'm done trying to figure out why this isn't working, or which BIOS settings combo I had to get right. 

 

First question: if I use a SATA card, like the popular Supermicro, will the BIOS still want to boot from a SATA disk on that controller?  I know every BIOS is different, I just mean as a matter of default, will most PC BIOSes want to boot from SATA?

 

Second question: can anyone recommend a good MB (intel or AMD, I don't care) that will boot from USB *everytime* without user input, no matter what is plugged into onboard SATA or PCI controllers?

 

Third question since I'm here, my MB has PCIEx1 slots (two) and an x16 slot.  If I get a pair of Supermicro SATA controllers, am I going to lose speed plugging them into the x1 slots?

 

Thanks.

your issue might be simply the bios(CMOS) battery is dead, so BIOS revert to the default config.

just find the the boot option and change the boot order to have usb first

The only things listed in the BIOS boot order are CDROM, SATA, and Removable.  I've got removable selected, and it still needs me to press F8.

 

System time was wrong... Maybe it is the CMOS battery.  Good call.

well without MB model and such difficult to say what settings need to be tweaked.

 

also to your PCIEx question you might loose speed on those cards , but only on them. other drives should work as is.

 

frankly I can not figure out why so many people so concern with speed on unraid.

what are you all doing on your servers for that to be a factor.

 

I am running mu current setup on old PC with a 100mHz bus and never had an issue with anything I need to do.  :-)

well without MB model and such difficult to say what settings need to be tweaked.

 

M5A78L-M.  I'll have to see if there is a BIOS update.

 

frankly I can not figure out why so many people so concern with speed on unraid.

what are you all doing on your servers for that to be a factor.

 

My Documents redirects for every Windows system in the house and a media server to numerous devices.  I'd like the gigabit NIC to be the bottleneck of this system so desktop interactivity and media playback aren't affected. 

ok but you are not using/Accessing the shares from all devices/Pc at the same time all the time?  are you?

 

 

ok but you are not using/Accessing the shares from all devices/Pc at the same time all the time?  are you?

 

Worst case scenario is five or six devices all simultaneously accessing (eventually) via 802.11ac speeds, with one or two via wired gig-e.  So I'd like to be ready for that.

 

 

The only things listed in the BIOS boot order are CDROM, SATA, and Removable.  I've got removable selected, and it still needs me to press F8.

 

Look at your hard disk boot order choices -- typically a different submenu than the boot order.    Many USB flash units show as hard drives -- NOT as a removeable USB device.  You may simply need to put the flash drive 1st on that list.

 

I agree that the initial cause of this issue was likely a failed BIOS battery (probably a CR2032).

 

 

 

 

 

M5A78L-M.  I'll have to see if there is a BIOS update.

 

 

I have this same motherboard and I can tell you it has booting issues problems.  If I put in a new hard drive (which will have a NTFS file system on it), it will ALWAYS try to boot from that new drive and when that fails, it simply does not look too see if any other drive has a bootable partition on it.  Since I use that machine to preclear new drives, I have a note pasted onto the front to the machine telling me to push the F8 to get to the boot menu!

 

EDIT:  Once the preclear is done and I get it set up AGAIN to boot properly (using the BIOS), it will then reboot every time.  That is until I put another new drive into it!  As I recall and as mentioned by graycase, that are a couple of places where there are options for setting what device is to boot first.  What happens is that any new drive that is attached to an on-board controller gets assigned to the top of the HD drive list.  I am surmising that once that it can't boot from that drive, it jumps to the next device type (like a CD-ROM drive) rather than checking other HD's. 

Replaced CMOS battery, still changes date/time between boots (or during service, frankly, system time is wrong every time I log in).

 

Looks like I may have a bad USB port; upgraded a disk tonight and system hanged at "initializing usb devices."  Moved the unraid flash disk to a different port, and it recognized it (although it still removed the USB drive from the first slot in the boot priority list and I had to change it to get it to boot).

 

It worked... for about two years.  Now suddenly its back to the way it was when I was first building the system (played heck trying to get it to boot off USB first, then one day it just worked and continued to work up until a few weeks ago).

 

May be time to get a new MB.

Replaced CMOS battery, still changes date/time between boots (or during service, frankly, system time is wrong every time I log in).

 

 

 

A thought.  Have you checked the Time zone setting under the 'Time and Date' icon on the 'Settings' tab? 

This has started happening me as well for no apparent reason.

 

My USB would show up just fine in my bios boot menu then one day, it didn't.

 

Now, I need to manually access the boot menu from the bios splash screen to access the USB drive and select it as the bootable device.

 

There's no problem with motherboard battery and no other bios settings that have changed.

 

This happened shortly after upgrading to 6b4.

 

Did anything change in the 'make-bootable' script in that version, I wonder?

 

 

Did anything change in the 'make-bootable' script in that version, I wonder?

 

 

For me these problems are occurring long before it even gets to booting an OS; its BIOS, for sure.