I attempted to reboot my unraid server. I started by attempting to Stop all drives. It hung at this stage for several hours and would never complete:( So I power cycled the server. Now it will not boot. It complains about Disk Boot Failure. Note that the server has been in operation for several months with a couple of reboots without any problems. I verified in the BIOS that the USB was selected as the priority boot drive. Note my BIOS has 3 USB boot setting: <USB-CDROM>, <USB-FDD> and <USB-ZIP/LS>. I have tried all 3 to be first boot priority. The MB is an Abit KN9 SLI. I have tried booting from my backup Flash as well (the flash were the ones provided By LimeTech). I think the flashes are ok, since I can read and write to them from another computer.

 

Has my MB gone south?!?! Any suggestions on what I should try next?

 

Thanks,

B2 

Sounds like you have taken the right steps.  "Disk Boot Failure" would normally be associated with a change in boot order, or a corrupted flash drive, both of which you attempted to detect or correct.  I would also try a ScanDisk/CheckDisk on the flash drive.  I would set the BIOS settings back to where they previously worked.  Try saving the contents of the flash drive, then preparing it fresh (reformat, syslinux, extract unRAID, copy config back, etc).

 

It usually is something simple in this situation, but yes, it could be the motherboard failing.  Seems too coincidental though.  Can you add a floppy disk drive or CD drive and see if it can boot from one of them?

I have just had a very similar problem.

 

I solved it by reseting the CMOS to defaults. I then had more failures in the form of checksum errors on the BIOS boot screen

 

Turned out this was the MB battery. I replaced this and evrything started to behave more stable again. Stuck with the BIOS defaults and only a few changes (MB is years old so havent a clue what I had changed over the years).

 

All ok so far, maybe this helps somebody else