June 20, 201610 yr Hi. I have recently dedicated my old laptop to be my personal nas. I have tried many OSs like windows server, freenas, and a couple others. I have decided on unRAID, but when I create my bootable flash drive, my laptop goes right to the bios screen. When I try to boot from my desktop, it goes right to the unRAID screen. does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Attached is a picture of the files that are on my flash drive.
June 20, 201610 yr Author I have already made the flash drive bootable, am I supposed to delete the file when Im done with it? I have also already set my laptop to boot from it. I'll post a picture of my bios screen.
June 20, 201610 yr And is your laptop configred to boot from usb? More than likely this since you said it works on your desktop. When setting to boot from USB you may have to enable the legacy boot option (if there is one listed) and set the boot from USB to non UEFI (there are typically two options, the one you want may rely on legacy boot being set to enabled). You can also likely try to hit F12 when the computer is on the boot screen and manually choosing the USB drive (more for testing than anything permanent).
June 20, 201610 yr Author My laptop has USB legacy support, but there is no non UEFI boot option for the flash drive, even though I enabled it. I will attach more pictures of my bios, and the options that I have.
June 20, 201610 yr Author Okay, the pictures, at the lowest quality are still too large to upload, so my options are all UEFI boot options, and legacy USB support for booting. I have also have AHCI mode enabled for my hard drive.
June 20, 201610 yr Okay, the pictures, at the lowest quality are still too large to upload, so my options are all UEFI boot options, and legacy USB support for booting. I have also have AHCI mode enabled for my hard drive. Unraid cannot be made UEFI bootable for now, so you are going to have to figure out how to disable secure boot somewhere in the BIOS to get normal boot options to show up. It's possible you may have to update the laptop BIOS.
June 20, 201610 yr Author so, even if I can boot to it uefi on my desktop, theres nothing I can do with it?
June 20, 201610 yr I have yet to see a computer that doesn't have a fallback to non UEFI boot, as was mentioned there is likely a setting that is masking the option to enable normal non secure boot (or UEFI). If you want to upload pics, throw them up on an external site such as Box or Google Drive, should only take a moment to complete. What's your laptop make/model? Are there any BIOS updates available?
June 20, 201610 yr Author Hi, sorry for the delayed response, I had to do some work on my truck, but heres a link to the folder containing my laptop bios images My laptop is an Asus, R503U, and im not sure about any bios updates. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z9bkpoeezcyle79/AAAPr2bZ6-ZQvNFGwd613VX4a?dl=0
June 20, 201610 yr no luck So no additional boot options are presented after turning off Secure Boot control?
June 20, 201610 yr Author no, and I think I might have just bricked it by selecting something along the lines of updating from removable media and now the backlight on the screen wont even turn on with the system. sucks too because I didnt mean to hit it.
June 21, 201610 yr "Legacy USB support" has nothing to do with the boot settings ... that just determines the operating mode of the USB controller. As already noted, you need to disable Secure Boot. Not sure what mode you've got the laptop in now -- if you in fact tried to update the BIOS from your USB flash drive you could have definitely "bricked" the machine ... but that's VERY unlikely as I doubt the BIOS update code would have attempted to do anything without finding the appropriate BIOS file on the flash drive (and clearly your UnRAID flash wouldn't have one). The FIRST thing you need to do after you can get to the BIOS again is disable Secure Boot. This will likely require that you select that option; then reboot; and then enter a key that's presented on the screen to confirm you really want to turn it off. Once you've done that, you should be able to set the system to boot from legacy (non-UEFI) devices, and it will boot from the flash drive with no problem. Note that the flash drive MAY be seen as a hard drive ... so you'll need to set the boot order to boot from the hard drive first; and set the hard drive order so the flash drive is listed first.
June 21, 201610 yr ... If the laptop won't even boot to the BIOS; then unplug it; remove the battery; and then hold the power switch down for ~ 30 seconds or longer. Then put the battery back in place and see if that resolves that issue.
June 21, 201610 yr Author I disabled secureboot before this happened, and there was no additional options, but if this works, Ill check again.
June 21, 201610 yr Author im going to let the laptop sit for about 30 mins. Ill let you know on the result.
June 21, 201610 yr Author Okay, I found out what the issue was... I recently had the laptop setup with an HDMI cable to my monitor for windows 10 that WAS on it, and that option that I clicked, made the HDMI the primary output... So, I decided to see if there was anything on the HDMI input in my monitor, and sure enough, there was.
June 21, 201610 yr Author THAT WORKED!! Thank you guys so much. I cant tell you how slow and useless that laptop has been, and it now has a use
June 21, 201610 yr Glad it's working; although I'm not sure how useful a laptop is as a NAS. With a single laptop drive your capacity will be pretty limited; and without a parity drive there's no fault tolerance ... but if the goal is simply to "play" with UnRAID to learn about its features, then this will certainly do the trick.
June 21, 201610 yr Author Yes it will. I also dont need any of that failsafe stuff. I just want another hard drive to use on my desktop, and figured this will work.
June 21, 201610 yr "Legacy USB support" has nothing to do with the boot settings ... that just determines the operating mode of the USB controller. I'm glad he got this fixed, however this is not universally true. While the legacy USB option is used to emulates a ps/2 or AT device when a USB mouse is used with an OS that dosen't support it (also can lead to issue when disabled getting into the BIOS), it can also disable a legacy non UEFI boot option. I don't recall if my current board does this, however it has certainly been an issue for me in the past. Sometimes this is just referred to as "boot mode" and you must ensure it is not set to UEFI only. Either way, this issue is solved.
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