Unable To Boot Also


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Ok well I apologize if this post sounds angry... it's because I am ... Especially in a product that expects me to pay a fee...

 

So far I've wasted the last 2+ hours of my Sunday trying to get unRAID to boot in my NAS at all. 

 

My hardware: 

MOBO: SuperMicro X10SLM+-LN4F

CPU: 4th Gen i3

RAM: 16GB ECC

 

I've been using FreeNAS for the last year or so. It boots up and runs from USB drives just fine with my hardware. Unfortunately I've had terrible success with the FreeNAS software itself... I can't even get SMB shares to work properly with FreeNAS... so I figured I'd try unRAID out. 

 

Now, I HAVE LITERALLY TRIED ALL NORMAL STEPS to make this boot, so don't ask me to try a USB2.0 port vs 3.0 because I did... yes system is 64bit....etc.... There is a more fundamental underlying problem here. Especially with so many other posts about this problem I've been reading through such as this one from yesterday!!!!!

 

I know this is in vain because everyone will invariably post non-useful suggestions in an infinite loop but here it goes:

What I've tried: 

 

- Multiple different USB drives; varying sizes; both branded of high quality and unbranded of questionable quality

- The Drive Creation Utility & Manual Mode (where you need to run the Make Bootable script)

- Multiple USB drive formatting methods and settings: UEFI / no UEFI, FAT vs FAT32, etc...

- Multiple USB ports on my mobo - both USB2.0 AND USB3.0

- Adjusting MOBO BIOS settings to boot the USB drive in various orders - ALL my USB drives "SHOW" just fine in MOBO BIOS boot order.

- Attempted to load a Linux ISO onto the USB drive, system booted to Linux as expected - boots FreeNAS immediately just fine from USB in a normal 3.0 port. 

- Troubleshooting steps here (under USB wont boot section) https://wiki.unraid.net/USB_Flash_Drive_Preparation

- Pausing the boot with the select boot screen and trying all the options (USB Drive, USB FDD, USB ZIP)

 

But seriously... I don't understand how a PAID product can have so many users with this issue. I tried out unRAID because normally you pay extra for products to JUST WORK. 

 

So, what's going on here? Can anyone shed some light on this? 

 

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Of you can it is worth seeing if you can boot off the USB device on another system?   Simply booting off the USB drive will not affect the system in question if you do nothing else so it does not matter if that system normally runs some other OS.  That will at least help pin down whether the problem is with USB stick or something else.

 

Another thing in might be worth checking is whether there is a folder called EFI~ on the USB drive and if so remove the trailing '~' character to enable UEFI boot options in case your board wants that.

 

Hopefully someone with the same mobo as you might be able to comment on whether any specific BIOS options are required to get the boot to work.

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Alright so this has been ridiculous but I finally got a successful boot.

 

The problem was not BIOS on my server. Or any other random stuff people suggested on other forums related to the server itself. As suggested above, I tried on a completely different PC and still got no boot. Same error actually "This is not a bootable disk" or occasionally "Missing operating system"

 

Then I tried having my roommate use his own flash drive, downloading the tool, imaging, and all completely separate from my setups (He uses win10 same as me - both updated OS's). IT WORKED! HE DID THE EXACT SAME THING AS ME but his tool and flashdrive booted in my nas immediately... 

 

so WTF...

 

NEXT, I took his working flash drive, re-downloaded the installer, ran it exactly as he did, but on my computer - FAIL!

 

Now, I had someone else also download the tool from scratch on their win10 pc, and load unRAID onto one of the drives that previously failed for me, it worked fine!

 

The Trick: I used the unRAID flashdrive tool on a completely different windows 10 PC. 

 

I actually tried a ton more combinations / [permutations across probably 6+ various flash drives on different friends computers. CRAZY MIXED RESULTS for the install process. Sometimes drives would throw errors in the creation tool. Sometimes it would appear successful but fail to boot in the NAS. Sometimes it would work fine. 

 

I have NO idea why any of this happened and could not detect a consistent pattern. Some obscure bug in the drive creation utility? Some problem with the way the tool and/or the manual process are formatting the drives? This also does not explain why the manual process failed for me as well. 

 

Anyway....

 

The only reason at this point that I'm still giving unRAID a shot is purely due to my preexisting hatred for FreeNAS....

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17 hours ago, iamatesla said:

The Trick: I used the unRAID flashdrive tool on a completely different windows 10 PC. 

That's the problem right?  Something about your win10 PC is incompatible with our Flash Creator tool.  Our flash creator needs to write the boot sector of the device, which is also one method to transmit malware, maybe there is a setting in Windows that is stopping this on your PC? - just a guess.

 

I hope your experience with Unraid goes a little better.  I think you find this a friendly and helpful Community.

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