Alright here's my problem - story is a bit of a long one, but hang in there I think the detail is a bit important.

 

I was running a MSI 970A-G43 series motherboard, an AMD FX 8 core AM3+ processor, 24 gigs of DDR3 1866MHz ram, a single parity drive with 4 hard drives in my main array, a 128Gb SSD for cache, and a few dockers - main ones being Plex, Transmission, a Minecraft Server, a Windows VM (mostly powered down), then a bunch of the support apps like Nerdpack and the like. This setup has been running strong for 6 months without a single power down, with a good amount of torrent and plex use, and some minor minecraft use. 

 

Today I was planning on upgrading the ram and storage, and taking some of the old ram and storage, putting it into another unraid box, and 'giving' to a friend so I'd have an off-site backup for my important files. So I started by powering down my system and removing my two 4Gb ram sticks to move to the new unraid box. Then I wanted to make sure my system would boot with the remaining ram (16Gb). Shocker - it didn't. Attempts to boot into unraid resulted in kernel panic, or end of trace (or both?). After lots of research and troubleshooting I attempted the following steps:

- Move ram into other slots (DIMMS 4 & 2 instead of 3 & 1). No effect

- Ran Unraid's memtest - let it run for a few hours, a few passes, no errors. Motherboard is recognizing all ram just fine...

- Change ram frequency to auto (which defaulted to 1333 MHz for some reason). No effect

- Reset CMOS battery by shorting JBAT1 jumper. Couldn't even boot into the unraid system anymore, as the Bios would not save my settings. This is an older motherboard, so I decided that maybe the CMOS battery is dying.

- Replaced the CMOS Battery. Booted up, changed settings. Settings still don't stay, but I determined how to force boot to the unraid usb. No effect. it's a bit upsetting that the motherboard bios boot settings won't stay anymore, might try updating the bios. Want to hear everyone's thoughts first.

- I returned the previously removed ram and made sure all sticks were in original positions. No effect.

- I then found other topics in the Lime forums stating that the usb stick could be corrupted. I removed the usb stick, put it into my windows laptop, and it's all there. I'm able to view the files just fine....and none of the system files or boot files have been changed since May of this year when the system was originally brought online. I've attached an image of both of the error screens I'm getting - I think they're basically the same error though. From my 'research' I think it's not recognizing the usb boot files.

 

Any bright ideas?

UPDATE: I flashed the bios to the latest version, to no end. Didn't even fix my problem with the bios settings either. I'll continue to impatiently await feedback. 

Use a different flash drive and create a new trial installation just to see if it boots.

Ok i installed 6.3.5 onto a new flash device and it worked. I can get into the unraid gui, and i can follow unraids instructions for registering a new key. I can access all my files on the old usb key, is there any way to use them to reduce the amount of work i need to do getting my system back the way it was?

You can try redoing your original flash, only thing you need to copy is the config folder, or if you prefer to transfer the license to the new flash drive again just copy the config folder from the old one.

Ok i will definitely try that and report back. So did i cause this by changing my system ram configuration? Or is it likely caused by an addon or a random failure of my usb key?

Likely cause by corruption or failure of your flash drive.

This worked like a charm. New usb key working, registered, and booting perfectly. Even shut down after initial boot, removed some of the ram, adjust bios settings, and booted back in easy. All my old settings are there with no data loss and the array is just like before. Thanks for the help!