Hey i have a bit of an odd one, i recently purchased a hard drive enclosure for my unraid server to replace my daisy chained external hard drives. They were connected through thunderbolt and so is the enclosure i purchased.

 

Here is where the strange things start happening. I plugged the external hard drive enclosure in and now unraid refuses to boot. but when i disconnect it it boots fine. i have tried selecting the unraid boot disk to selectively boot from it hoping that would work but to no avail.

 

If anyone has any info about this please let me know. The hardware i am using is listed below.

 

Computer: https://support.apple.com/kb/sp659?locale=en_US

HD Enclosure: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2IVKIT0GB/

 

i am pretty new to unraid and linux in general and have been using it primarily as a media server/game server.

 

Oh ya my diagnostic for my server.

wiresinkserv-diagnostics-20160805-1553.zip

Have you check your BIOS to see what the boot options are?    Also, some BIOS allow you to hit a key (F8 for one of my computers) during POST so that you can select the boot device.

As far as bios go macs really don't have them as far as i'm aware. i can selectively choose which disk to boot from and i am selecting the correct one which is the unraid server, but it only boots when the hard drive bay is disconnected.

 

I haven't read anywhere that unRAID supports Thunderbolt connected disks.

 

Other people have tried to use old "cheesegrater-style" Mac Pros as unRAID servers but failed to get them to boot because of their UEFI boot mechanism.

I am currently running my unraid server with a external hard drive through a thunderport. Even if they were incompatible it wouldn't explain the fact that the server wont boot when only the new drive bay is connected. i can reconnect the external hard drive through thunderbolt and it works perfectly.

Then, by a process of elimination, the problem must lie with your external enclosure.

 

How are you getting the Mac Mini to boot from the unRAID USB device, anyway? Can it boot OS X with the enclosure connected? Is it trying to boot from a disk in the enclosure? Have you tried powering up while pressing the Option key?

 

I use Macs but not as a platform for running unRAID. I'm not sure anyone does successfully.

 

the mac mini does not have osX installed on it atm. I have connected the drive to another mac and all 4 drives show up, no software installed just plug and play.

 

i have powered it up holding the option key and selected the unraid USB device.

 

I am more just stumped by why it just refuses to boot even when you manually select which boot drive to boot from.

 

The reason i'm using this mac mini is because i got it for free from a place i worked at when they shut down. i assumed since i had connected thunderbolt drives to it before it would work with other thunderbolt devices. also hoping i would be able to use the thunderbolt since its the fastest port on the machine.

 

I would expect a Mac that's running OS X to see the Thunderbolt drives because it has the drivers to cope with them. I've done a search and I can't find any reference to unRAID having support for Thunderbolt so I have nothing more to suggest. I'm puzzled, though, that you're able to boot the Mac Mini from a standard unRAID USB device at all - did you create it in some special way to provide an EFI partition?

nope just made it and plugged it in. then plugged an old external hd into it via thunderbolt and it worked.