Hi all, new here.

 

Recently I purchase UNRaid Pro on USB, and plugged the supplied USB into the server.

 

The server has an Asrock H170M Pro4 motherboard, 32GB Kingston Hyper FuryX memory, an i5 Skylake at 3.30GHz, 2 256GB AData SSDs, 1x 4TB HGST NAS drive, and 6x 3TB WD Red drives. Also put in an NVidia 780 EVGA SSC in there.

 

All is fine, motherboard boots off the USB. This is where things get hairy. I see the boot menu and UNRaid boots...going to display two lines in console. When it gets to "loading btroot....OK" the screen flashes...and after a while re-appears.

 

From there it's stuck with a flashing cursor.

 

I even tried removing all components and leaving the motherboard, cpu and ram only...still same thing happens.

 

Any ideas please?

 

Thank you.

The first thing to try is select the option to run a MemTest from the unRAID boot menu and let that run for a few cycles to carry out a basic confidence check of the hardware.  Memory faults can have unpredictable symptoms so it should always be one of the first things to check in scenarios such as yours.

 

A possibility is that one of the files on the USB stick is corrupt.  You could try plugging it into your PC and see if it boots there (do not do anything else if it does boot successfully) as that checks out the USb stick contents.  If you suspect it is the USB stick then I would suggest that you plug the USB stick into your PC, and if it complains about problems with the USB stick let it fix them.  Then download the ZIP release of unRAID from the LimeTech site, and extract all the files from it overwriting the copies on the USB stick.

 

Another possibility is that there is some sort of hardware fault and it is nothing to do with the USB stick.  A way to validate that would be to find another USB stick; format it on the PC as FAT32; label it as UNRAID; extract all the files from the unRAID ZIP download onto the USB stick; run the make_bootable.bat (as Adminsitrator) from the USB stick.    That will give you another USB stick (albeit not licensed) which you can try and see if it boots OK as if it gives the same symptoms then the problem is not the USb stick.

 

One final thing that occurs to me - is the current USB stick plugged into a USB 2 or a USB 3 port?  Many people have reported having problems trying to boot off a USB 3 port (assuming you have both types).

Thanks mate.

 

I ran the memtest for 3 days non-stop, didn't spew out any errors.

 

As for the USB interface...it's a USB 3.1...I'll try switching to a USB 2.0, if that still doesn't work, I'll pop a trial of UNRaid before contacting LimeTech for a replacement (if the USB pendrive is faulty)

I would make sure that you copy the .key file in the 'config' folder on the USB stick to somewhere safe.  That is the license file that is tied to the GUID of that particular USB stick.    All other files on the USB drive can be obtained from the ZIP download of unRAID.

Quick update, seems the problem was when unplugging everything I forgot to unplug the SSDs.

 

Upon further inspection I found out that one of the two SSDs wasn't showing up in the motherboard settings. I unplugged and re-plugged it's SATA...and now UNRaid boots!

 

I'm still getting tons of "ACPI" errors in console, but the WebUI starts up, and am building the array and stuff.

 

Thanks again.

 

EDIT: The ACPI errors were solved by switching to a USB 2.0 port as "itimpi" suggested.