Can someone please give me step-by-step instructions for how I would install unRaid without a USB drive? If this is not possible then I am going to have to buy a different product.

I suspect the reasons you want to do this aren't based on a good understanding of how this works.

 

The OS doesn't really run from the USB drive, it just unpacks the archive of the OS into RAM when it boots, and the OS actually is running in RAM. Other than bootup, the USB drive isn't really used much. Just occasionally written when you save some configuration change.

 

Can you tell us why you think you don't want to put it on a USB drive?

 

The machine is a laptop with only one USB port which I don't want to block (nor do I want to carry a hub everywhere since it's a laptop). I don't want to have to keep a USB stick in the computer every time I boot it up.

Edited April 21, 20179 yr by ebee

3 minutes ago, ebee said:

The machine is a laptop with only one USB port which I don't want to block (nor do I want to carry a hub everywhere since it's a laptop). I don't want to have to keep a USB stick in the computer every time I boot it up.

Why do you want to run a NAS on a laptop?

 

If all you are interested in are VMs and maybe dockers then some other linux distro may be more suitable.

I want to run a hypervisor on a laptop. From my experience unRaid is the easiest one to setup, easiest to manage, is very flexible, and I already have other machines running it. If I can't get it running on this laptop then I'll use ESXi.

ESXi is going to be tough to run on a laptop as far as hardware requirements go. Why don't you try Hyper-V I am sure you'll have much better luck installing a Microsoft Server OS on bare metal on your laptop.

I've had bad experiences with Hyper-V in the past and would prefer to avoid it. This computer won't be running Windows anyways.

 

Proxmox is another option I might investigate but it looks less user-friendly than ESXi.

Edited April 21, 20179 yr by ebee

16 hours ago, ebee said:

I want to run a hypervisor on a laptop. From my experience unRaid is the easiest one to setup, easiest to manage, is very flexible, and I already have other machines running it. If I can't get it running on this laptop then I'll use ESXi.

I haven't used ESXi in quite a while, but when I used it you couldn't actually use the computer it was installed on, it was designed to be basically a headless system. If you are able to use the system via passing through a gfx card to a vm or something then that is 100% a better solution for you. Unraid is a NAS server above all else, the hypervisor role is an afterthought and should not be the primary reason to use it as there are other, better, hypervisors available.

 

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I don't think you can use that drive to store your virtual machines, so you'll have to have an external drive for them and they will be slow as hell.

 

Basically, Unraid is not the right product to use here. I think you would be wasting your time even looking at this product for that application.

hmm that's a good point. they would be on the same drive. different partitions but probably slow. i'll keep looking around then. thanks for the help.

1 hour ago, realmonster said:

Maybe trick the process by taking the drive out and putting it in an enclosure?

Unless the enclosure can present a unique GUID the same way flash drives do there is no way to get a license for it, not even trial.

46 minutes ago, trurl said:

Unless the enclosure can present a unique GUID the same way flash drives do there is no way to get a license for it, not even trial.

i thought the board on the hd held the GUID. i guess regardless, im 100% sure that unraid is not appropriate here

Let's be honest, unRaid uses the USB and its unique GUID as a way to avoid people pirating the unRaid software. There is no way around using a USB without hacking unRaid.

 

As has been debated ad nausium over and over here, the USB is very lightly used, mostly only when booting. It has not proven to be a component that wears out or fails very often. It does not affect performance after booting. And the mechanism to replace one is now very easy.

 

The cost of unRaid is very modest compared to the value it provides to give very lightweight redundancy to a very large amount of data.

 

There is no other piece of software I have ever owned that has grown in features so dramatically over time without any requirement for upgrade fees. It is truly remarkable IMO. 

 

Approaches to bypass unRaid controls are inappropriate in the forum. Even if the requester has what you believe to be a valid use case, I would ask that we not offer "useful" hints that might be used inappropriately. 

 

As un-useful as it might have been, I removed a few sentences from realmonster's post above.