I'm currently running 4.5b6, and have been for several months now.  Tonight I tried upgrading to 4.5 final, but I am unable to get it to boot successfully.  The last few messages I get are:

VFS: Cannot open device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,1)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
Kernel panic [etc]

 

My USB stick is formatted as a USB-ZIP because my m/b won't boot this stick if I format it as HDD; I wonder if that's causing a problem.

How did you update the flash drive?  You might take it to a Windows station and run ScanDisk/CheckDisk on it.

 

Also, it never hurts to re-verify the boot order in the BIOS options.  It does look like you are booting a Linux, but is it possible there is another Linux bootable device installed?

I copied bzimage, bzroot, and memtest from the extracted 4.5final zip file to the boot share on my unRAId server, after renaming the 4.5b6 files and adding a fallback menu option to syslinux.cfg:

default menu.c32
menu title Lime Technology LLC
prompt 0
timeout 50
label unRAID OS
  menu default
  kernel bzimage
  append initrd=bzroot iommu=soft
label unRAID OS 4.5b6
  kernel bzimage.45b6
  append initrd=bzroot.45b6 iommu=soft
label unRAID OS 4.4.2
  kernel bzimage.442
  append initrd=bzroot.442 iommu=soft
label Memtest86+
  kernel memtest

 

This is the same procedure I used to upgrade from 4.4.2 to 4.5b6 several months ago.  It's definitely booting from the right media - I can still select and boot 4.5b6 just fine.

 

I've done binary compares between the extracted files and the copies on the USB key, but I'll bring down unRAID and chkdsk the USB key this evening.

I noticed you have bzimage.45b6 and bzroot.45b6, which is not supposed to work, see Joe's post here (rootdelay parameter no longer needed).  However, you have said it works for you.  I know I had trouble with that, until Joe explained why.  Perhaps there is a newer syslinux.exe.  If needed, replace bzimage.45b6 with bzimage4.5b6, etc.

 

You might try downloading v4.5 final again, perhaps it was corrupted.

 

As a long shot, you might add another syslinux boot section without the iommu=soft parameter.  Perhaps support for it has changed or it has been removed.

label unRAID OS no_iommu_parm

  kernel bzimage

  append initrd=bzroot

Thanks for the suggestions, Rob.  I've tried downloading again, but the file was binary-identical.  Also tried removing the iommu parm, to no avail.  I even renamed the .45b6 files to .456 in case that was confusing things, but still no luck with 4.5 final.  I wonder if anyone still has a copy of 4.5b8 avilable - I would like to try out the cache drive with my plus license, and I suspect it may be the new kernel introduced in b9 that's causing the problem.  Meanwhile 4.5b6 continues to be solid for me, so I'm not hurting if this takes a while to resolve.

unRAID Server 4.5-beta8.zip

 

courtesy of MediaFire

Thanks!  I'll try that this weekend.

4.5b8 works just fine.  I guess my next step would be to try b9, since that was when the new kernel was introduced.  I'm betting it'll crap out.  Got it handy?

The next one is actually v4.5-beta11, because of a couple of bugs in beta9 and beta10, see the Release Notes.  They were withdrawn, and beta11 is just a fixed beta9.

 

  unRAID Server 4.5-beta11.zip

 

courtesy of MediaFire