I am trying out unRAID for the first time and have not even gotten it to boot.  I'm using a Supermicro X9SCV-Q with an i3-2330M CPU.  I followed the instructions on the donwload page to format and prepare a 4GB Kingston flash drive.  I then insert the flash drive into the onboard type A port and try to boot from it.  Every single time it finishes the POST and then immediately freezes on a pure black screen.  CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't work and I have to hold the power button to turn it off.  I have tried disabling Virtualization and enabling/disabling UEFI but nothing helps.  I know the hardware is good because it ran Windows Server 2012 R2 flawlessly for several months.

 

My exact procedure for preparing the flash drive (in Windows 10) is:

1. use diskpart to clean the drive

2. use disk management to format as FAT32

3. set volume label to UNRAID

4. extract release zip to root of drive

5. run Make Bootable as administrator

That preparation looks correct. 

 

You have not mentioned doing anything after powering on to tell the PC to boot from the USB drive.

Did you go into the BIOS and check to see if you have set the BIOS to boot FIRST from the USB drive?  From your description, you sounds like the BIOS is not finding anything to boot from.  You might read your MB manual as many MB have a key (like F12 or F8) that you can hit during post to select the boot device. 

 

A second thing to do is to try to boot your Flash Drive on other computers.

I just tested booting the flash drive in another PC and it worked fine.  I have of course checked the boot order and set the flash drive first.  Doesn't matter if I try legacy or UEFI, it always freezes.  I have tried different flash drives as well.  It seems to be a grub or syslinux issue since I can't even see the boot menu.  I guess I'll start doing some research in that direction.

Make sure that you are using an USB 2.0 port.  Using USB 3.0 ports has had issues with certain MB's. 

 

If you can modify this thread name you might want to do by changing the topic to something "Problem Booting with Supermicro X9SCV-Q MB (was-- Freeze on black screen during first boot)". 

 

There are a lot of folks who are using the Supermicro MB's so I would think that someone would have the same MB and can help you get it setup to work. 

This motherboard doesn't have USB 3.0.  I tried disabling anything and everything in the BIOS that I could as well as a few different USB ports and still nothing.  I then tried a YUMI flash drive which also uses syslinux, and sure enough still nothing.  So, the problem is with syslinux for sure and entirely not related to unRAID.

Check for a BIOS update...

Are you using a HDMI port or the VGA port?  If HDMI, Try the VGA port...

The board already has the latest BIOS and I'm using VGA.  I've now tried creating the unRAID boot media on a Windows 7 x86 computer, tried downgrading syslinux, tried switching to a PS/2 keyboard, low level formatting the flash drive, and adding the s parameter to the make bootable batch file.  I don't know what else to try.  I do have an older MSI Core 2 mobile mini-itx board I could use, but it doesn't support 4TB hard drives.  I was hoping to play around with KVM as well, but ultimately wouldn't be using that feature on this system anyway.

I am sorry as I am at a loss as to where to go from here.  I hope someone with the same MB as you have will jump in to give you some guidance. 

One thing I just found on my Tyan S5512 MBs is I can't have my Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander plugged into a slot and boot a USB device.  Not sure how it gets affected but when I use the molex power plug instead of plugging it into a PCIe slot the computer will then boot from my USB boot device.  I have a Kingston SD Reader but I tried an ESXi USB boot flash and ESXi wouldn't boot either until I removed my SAS expander from the PCIe slot.

 

 

So do you have a situation like that?

I'm not using any add-in controller cards.  Just two 4TB hard drives and a 250GB SSD.  Each are plugged into the onboard SATA ports in AHCI mode.  The SSD has Windows Server 2012 R2 on it but I can't use that anymore after trying to change the IP address with vCenter installed. (do NOT do that)  The 4TB disks are empty.

 

My next test will be attaching a laptop HDD via USB adapter to see if that boots.  If not, I will try to obtain a SATA DOM which is natively supported by the motherboard.

Tested again with a 30GB SSD connected via USB adapter - FAIL

Plugged SSD into onboard SATA port - FAIL

 

I'm done. Nothing using syslinux will boot on this motherboard.

I would contact Supermicro support about this.  I can't believe that it is really true...  (At lot of Supermicro MB's are used in servers and the vast majority of those run Linux!)

I had to use Rufus on my SD Reader to get it to boot on my Tyan S5512.  I had to delete the existing partition and create a new one that was setup for "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI".  When I did that I could boot from my SD Readers.  Before that I could only use a genuine USB flash drive not a reader.  You might give Rufus a try and recreate a partition on it.

Tried Rufus, still no luck.  It's a sweet utility I didn't know about, so thank you for that.

 

I have emailed Supermicro support so hopefully they will be able to help.

Tried Rufus, still no luck.  It's a sweet utility I didn't know about, so thank you for that.

 

I have emailed Supermicro support so hopefully they will be able to help.

Something weird with your board then.  I've not had any problems booting from USB with my X9SCM-F MB or any earlier models before I switched to Tyan MBs.  Hopefully they can get you fixed up.  I've contacted SuperMicro support in the past and they always got back to me.  If they can't get you an upgraded bios that works (assuming that is the problem anyway) then maybe they can suggest an older bios that DOES work that you could downgrade to.  Just be carefully if you try to downgrade as I bricked a X9SCM-F MB.  Never had a problem going the other way.  Tyan support was nice enough to give me the commands to downgrade their MB correctly when I had a problem with an ATSC tuner card that worked on one MB with an earlier bios but not on the same model with an updated bios.  That tuner also had the same problem with my X9SCM MB after upgrading the bios went from a working state to not recognized after updating the bios.  So I tried to downgrade back to the bios version that I had before the upgrade and bricked it.  Moved on to Tyan when I needed more PCIe slots and they had the slot configuration I wanted.

I FIXED IT!!!!

 

Further investigation found NOTHING would boot from USB.  I cleared CMOS, entered setup and loaded Optimized Defaults, rebooted, and VOILA!  Case closed.

 

*happy dance*

I FIXED IT!!!!

 

Further investigation found NOTHING would boot from USB.  I cleared CMOS, entered setup and loaded Optimized Defaults, rebooted, and VOILA!  Case closed.

 

*happy dance*

I've done that before myself to fix other things.  Glad you got it working.