I am running unRAID v5.0.6

My motherboard is an asrock 880GM-LE FX

The flash Drive unraid is running from is a sandisk cruzer fit 16GB

 

So today I received a new WD Red 2TB drive from newegg and shutdown my server so I could install the drive and run a preclear on it. I got the drive installed and hooked the server back up to everything and booted it. After about five minutes I tried to access the web interface and noticed the server still hadn't come up, so I waited another few minutes and tried again, no dice (I run headless or I would have realized I had a problem sooner). So I go get my monitor and USB keyboard out and hook everything up, and on my screen I see, "Reboot and Select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." The following are the troubleshooting steps I took in the order I took them:

-I restart the server and open the BIOS to check and make sure my settings hadn't been changed and everything there checked out, I was still set to boot from USB as my only boot device.

-I tried switching the USB drive to a couple different ports and was still getting the same message so my first assumption was that my drive had died.

-I shutdown again and pull the drive and plug it into my desktop and it shows up no problem. Ran chkdisk on the drive and it also reported no issues. I next tried to run make_bootable.bat again as administrator which ran fine however the problem still persisted.

-Next I downloaded a fresh copy of 5.0.6 from the downloads section and prepared a different flash drive per the instructions, still no change. Just to be absolutely sure it wasn't something with unraid or the way I was attempting to create the disk I inserted a bootable copy of Kali Linux that I know for a fact works and I still am getting the same message.

-Given the futility of my previous efforts I decided to try to update my BIOS in the hopes that it would resolve whatever was causing my issue. So I loaded up a freshly FAT32 formatted flash drive and put the ROM file on it per the manufacturer instructions and ran the Instant flash utility from inside the BIOS. The flash utility detected and scanned the flash drive for the file as well as the six unraid SATA drives I had connected and didn't find anything.

-After a couple tries with various flash drives and BIOS versions I decided to try unplugging one of my unraid data drives and replacing it with a small 30GB SSD I had laying around with the latest BIOS file on it. This worked great! the BIOS saw it and upgraded without a hitch.

-After restarting I tried the two unraid flash drives again as well as the Kali Linux drive as a control group and I am still getting the same message every time.

-I just tried plugging in a USB expansion plate to the extra USB headers on the board to see if I could boot from that but alas still no good there either.

 

Based on this it seems as though all the USB ports on my motherboard are dead however my USB keyboard that I have been using this whole time for troubleshooting works fine. Has anyone ever experienced something like this before? Any suggestions on what I could try that I haven't already done beyond replacing the motherboard (which I am saving for a last resort)? Newegg has the same board for about $55 so it wouldn't be prohibitively expensive to get a new one.

It is not at all unusual for the BIOS to put restrictions on how many bootable devices can be seen.  How many drives do you currently have connected?

 

How are the SATA drives connected?  If it is an add-on card then you may want to see if there is an option in the settings for the card for disabling INT 13 as that stops the attached devices from being seen as bootable devices.

Look to see if your motherboard has a key sequence you can press to select the boot device.  My Asus/AMI does, maybe F8?  This gives me a dialog with the bootable devices to select from.  This can be helpful in debugging, as well as forcing a boot into unRAID.

itimpi: I can see the usb drive just fine in the BIOS though. The SATA drive I just added would make 12 2TB HDDs. Six are connected to the motherboard and the other six are spread across two expansion cards. I have two connected to a Silicon Image SIL3132 and four connected to a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-Port SAS card. I will look at their BIOS and see if I can disable the drives being seen as bootable devices.

tdallen: thank you for the suggestion, that was one of the things I found here on the forums when I was searching for threads from people with similar problems. Mine is F11 and unfortunately it still insists I do not have any bootable media inserted.

 

itimpi: Thank you for your suggestion! that was indeed what was causing my issue. Once I disabled INT13 on the SAS card the system booted no problem. Thanks again for your help!