So I stupidly upgraded the motherboard BIOS when it turns out I didn't need to. Let's not talk about that. As far as I can tell, it went smoothly, no error messages or anything and the system posts and goes to the unRAID booting up process. The problem is that suddenly the DHCP process thing couldn't get an IP address, even though I have it set up for a static address (which I would have assumed bypasses that process, obviously not). So I'm doing some troubleshooting and stuff, and then suddenly I get issues where it can't find the boot disk ("waiting for /dev/disk/by-label/UNRAID (will check for 30 seconds)" error message). I saw someone say that meant that the boot drive was corrupted in some way, so I backed up the thing, reformatted and repasted in my build, make_bootable.bat, issue persists (presumably there is something in there that is causing the problem, but I can't figure it out). I'd really rather not have to redo everything, I'm kind of a hands off person, once I got it the way I wanted it three months ago, I have almost not touched it. I have no idea what kinds of settings I had set. 

 

I have since reverted the BIOS to the old firmware, which, yeah, was probably stupid too, it was a long shot that didn't work out. The only idea I have left is that there may be some settings in the BIOS that got reset in the changing I did there but I wouldn't know what to change because, as I said earlier, I have no idea what the settings were changed to to begin with. 

 

Okay, after typing the above, I figured I would do the diagnostics thing cuz maybe that would help, and the by-label thing didn't show up. IP issue is still there. It is actually weirder now, my router shows that the MAC associated with my server has an IP (different to the static one I set up), but ifconfig still shows no IP and I can't ping the one the router shows from my desktop. 

 

And hey, now I try to get the diagnostics file off of the boot drive and its completely corrupted. Redo that again and the by-label thing is back, but now IP is getting an address at the same not static one I set as before. Still can't ping either way (even managed the would-be infinite pinging because I forgot about that). What a comedy of errors. I have no idea what to do now. Kudos to anyone that actually read all of this.

Have you checked that you're not using some UEFI option?  Also look at USB boot options and go for legacy. 

I've disabled the all the boot options that aren't the UNRAID drive (including the UEFI one). I've changed a setting that had UEFI or Legacy to legacy, I forget the exact title. Same issues with IP. Any other ideas?

 

Try a different USB port (go from USB3 to USB2 and vice-versa).  And it never hurts to outright reset the BIOS settings completely back to default.

Had a similar issue with the flash drive once, this fixed it.

 

Backup your flash drive then open a command prompt window as administrator, then type, in this order:

 

-diskpart

-list disk

-select disk x (x=your flash drive)

-clean

-create partition primary

-format fs=fat32 label=UNRAID quick

-active

-assign

-exit

 

-close cmd window

-copy unraid files

-execute make_bootable as admin

 

It should work now.

Finally managed to get back on this, the disk tool thing didn't work, same IP and drive label issues persist. I'm starting to think it might be the drive itself. Does that make any sense?

Maybe, could try booting from the same stick in a different PC.  OR creating a new stick checking it boots in a different PC then trying in your server.  Either way you need to eliminate the flash disk as the problem before you can conclude it's your motherboard.

when you upgrade your bios it will normally put all your bios settings back to default.

If you have not already i should carefully go through all bios settings making sure they are as they were when you first setup your server.

I've got the biggest smile on my face right now. You were right, it was a BIOS setting. I had figured as much as well, as you say the intuitive thing after an update is settings being reset, it had just been so long I wasn't sure what all settings I had changed (and which ones had been adjusted back when I used this build as my PC). Turns out the IOMMU controller was disabled and needed to be enabled. Doesn't make much sense to me, as far as I know IOMMU is VM related, but I shall not complain (especially since this all started because I wanted to VM retropie to play around with it until my Raspberry Pi gets here (which was itself stupid apparently given incompatible architectures and stuff)). Thanks for all the help everyone!

Well done...