I have unRaid running on a ASUS P5B-VM D0 motherboard. System has been great until last weekend. Here I added my 6th drive and as usual, I go into the bios and confirm my 1GB Kingston usb drive is the only available option to boot. I start up my system and get on screen "Boot Error". I've rebooted my system countless times. Every time I add a drive the bios switches things up on me so I've gotten used to checking whenever I open the box.

 

Now I'm thinking its the new drive (Samsung F1) so I remove the drive, check bios, reboot and same error.

 

I then plug the drive into my laptop and notice the volume name is gone. I back everything up, try to reapply UNRAID and no dice. I go though a series of reformat using FAT, FAT32, HP Tool, Low Level Format. I tried using different usb ports. I tried most every trick in the book. Everything yields the same result. So I go to my laptop and reboot using the thumb drive and unRaid starts right up. I try again on the server..Boot Error.

 

I go and configure another thumb drive and my server boots up no problem. I was able to get my server up by using 2 usb drives, one to boot and one with my license.

 

Question now is what gives? Drive seems to work fine on other systems. It used to work fine here. What am I missing?

 

One more thing when I plug the Kingston drive drive into my laptop I get a pop up that it would be faster if I used a high speed port. Thing is I am using a high speed port.  My other thumb drives don't produce the pop up.

 

Sorry it so long I wanted to get it all out there.

I have unRaid running on a ASUS P5B-VM D0 motherboard. System has been great until last weekend. Here I added my 6th drive and as usual, I go into the bios and confirm my 1GB Kingston usb drive is the only available option to boot. I start up my system and get on screen "Boot Error". I've rebooted my system countless times. Every time I add a drive the bios switches things up on me so I've gotten used to checking whenever I open the box.

 

Now I'm thinking its the new drive (Samsung F1) so I remove the drive, check bios, reboot and same error.

 

I then plug the drive into my laptop and notice the volume name is gone. I back everything up, try to reapply UNRAID and no dice. I go though a series of reformat using FAT, FAT32, HP Tool, Low Level Format. I tried using different usb ports. I tried most every trick in the book. Everything yields the same result. So I go to my laptop and reboot using the thumb drive and unRaid starts right up. I try again on the server..Boot Error.

 

I go and configure another thumb drive and my server boots up no problem. I was able to get my server up by using 2 usb drives, one to boot and one with my license.

 

Question now is what gives? Drive seems to work fine on other systems. It used to work fine here. What am I missing?

 

One more thing when I plug the Kingston drive drive into my laptop I get a pop up that it would be faster if I used a high speed port. Thing is I am using a high speed port.   My other thumb drives don't produce the pop up.

 

Sorry it so long I wanted to get it all out there.

Did you re-run the syslinux -ma  command on the flash drive?  It sounds like it is not marked as bootable.

 

Joe L.

Thanks for responding

 

Yes, I used the -ma option.

 

The usb drive boots on my laptop fine. Just won't boot on my server. I tried in different ports with and without usb keyboard. I'm probably going to upgrade to pro soon so I'll ask Tom to licence me for the new drive just was hoping someone might be able to spot my oversight.

Thanks for responding

 

Yes, I used the -ma option.

 

The usb drive boots on my laptop fine. Just won't boot on my server. I tried in different ports with and without usb keyboard. I'm probably going to upgrade to pro soon so I'll ask Tom to licence me for the new drive just was hoping someone might be able to spot my oversight.

Here's something you can try:

 

Can you boot up your unRAID server with a different flash drive?  If so, by using the tip in

this post

you can plug in the current flash drive so it can be read for the .key file on it, and the alternate flash drive to boot from.

 

Then, send Tom an e-mail describing how the flash drive won't boot any longer, and the GUID of the newer flash drive, and odds are you'll be back up running normally again.  It all depends on if the old flash drive is readable after you boot with a different drive.

 

Who knows, it could be the USB ports on the server, or it be the BIOS is trying to use USB 2 speeds when the flash drive can only do USB 1 now.

 

Joe L.

Awesome tip... I previously managed to boot using another thumb drive. Through trial and error I figured If I mirrored the original flash drive to an new usb drive and have both in the server for booting it will boot up. A hack but it got me running.

 

I will will definately try the posted solution. It should give me more control over the situiation.

 

Thanks again..

 

 

I go into the bios and confirm my 1GB Kingston usb drive is the only available option to boot. I start up my system and get on screen "Boot Error". I've rebooted my system countless times. Every time I add a drive the bios switches things up on me so I've gotten used to checking whenever I open the box.

 

Ya know, strange situation, but it has a ring of familiarity.

When I added an additional set of drives, my SD card in the card reader no longer was seen or booted as an HD. I had to reset the BIOS to boot it as a USB Floppy.

I don't remember reformatting it, but it could have been formatted that way to begin with.

This was with an ABIT AB9 PRO.