Computer gets past POST and then I get a black screen with a flashing underscore character. Let it sit like this for an hour and nothing happened. Have tried restarting it numerous times... Any suggestions what I should try next?

- Check the boot order in the BIOS.  Make sure its set to boot off of the flash drive. (Legacy / non-uefi)

 

- Manually set the boot order on the fly (usually F9) and select the flash drive (Legacy / non-uefi)

 

- Check the flash drive on your windows / mac box for corruption

 

and if that doesn't work, you can always take your flash drive out, put it in another computer, go into the folder called 'previous' on the flash drive, and copy the BZROOT and BZIMAGE files from that folder into the root of the flash drive overwriting the exisitng ones. This will effectively roll you back to the previous version of unRAID.

How can I make sure my flash drive is still set to bootable ? My bios did show that my computer was set to boot from hard drive - I thought that I used to be able to see the USB drive to choose from but now I just see an option for removable drive to boot from

I am operating under the impression that your flash drive is still bootable but perhaps either the BZROOT or BZIMAGE files are corrupted. See if you can get the server to boot with your flash drive normally first before making any changes.

How can I make sure my flash drive is still set to bootable ? My bios did show that my computer was set to boot from hard drive - I thought that I used to be able to see the USB drive to choose from but now I just see an option for removable drive to boot from

Most bios's do show the flash drive in the hard drive list.

 

Try a different port.  Try putting the flash drive in another computer and rerun makebootable on it (run as administrator)

What happens if you press F9 (or whatever appears on the screen) instead of DEL to change the boot order on the fly?

used the quick boot popup menu to change to my usb drive - not sure why I couldn't find it in my advanced bios menu. That seemed to fix the issue. did plug the drive into my computer and tried to run the make bootable but i got an error saying syslinux executable could not be found even though I can see it just fine in the folder.