Installing Unraid

[GiffiCheez]

After watching the new video about automating Linus's garage doors, I realized that there are much better ways for me to run my home server and I decided to set up Unraid. I've spent some hours trying to boot to my USB drive with the installer on it. When I boot up the computer, there's a message that says that only hard disks and CD-ROM devices are supported. However, in the boot menu there are devices such as USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, USB-HDD. The motherboard I'm using is a Gigabyte P35-DS3L (rev. 2). In the past, I've been able to install Windows 10 on this computer. As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to install Unraid with a CD, SD card, or SATA drive.

 

What do you think my next step in troubleshooting should be? Is there a workaround I can use to boot to a USB drive? Is it possible to install Unraid without a USB drive? Or, should I try using a similar alternative like FreeNAS?

 

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can normally see your usb drive under the hdd list, but depends on the board.

 

Wht is the rest of the hrdware in the system? 

 

Unraid only supports usb drives for the boot drive.

[GiffiCheez]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can normally see your usb drive under the hdd list, but depends on the board.

 

Wht is the rest of the hrdware in the system? 

 

Unraid only supports usb drives for the boot drive.

I haven't been seeing the USB drive in the HDD list.

 

Here are the specs:

Core 2 Duo E8600

4x2GB A-Tech DDR2 800Mhz

Quadro FX 3800

Crucial M4 128GB SATA SSD

some SATA hard drives

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, GiffiCheez said:

I haven't been seeing the USB drive in the HDD list.

 

Here are the specs:

Core 2 Duo E8600

4x2GB A-Tech DDR2 800Mhz

Quadro FX 3800

Crucial M4 128GB SATA SSD

some SATA hard drives

And the usb-hdd option doesn't work either?

 

Do you have a different usb stick you can try?

 

Otherwise id try a different os, like windows 10, proxmox, freenas, omv or others.

[GiffiCheez]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

And the usb-hdd option doesn't work either?

 

Do you have a different usb stick you can try?

 

Otherwise id try a different os, like windows 10, proxmox, freenas, omv or others.

I finally got it working! I did a manual installation on a SATA hard drive and it worked. Thanks for your time.

[thegoonfather]

How did you manage to install Unraid to a hdd? As far as I know it only supports install to a USB stick and then loads the OS in to Ram. 

[GiffiCheez]

6 hours ago, thegoonfather said:

How did you manage to install Unraid to a hdd? As far as I know it only supports install to a USB stick and then loads the OS in to Ram. 

I followed this part of the Getting Started guide, except with a hard drive, and then booted to the hard drive on the computer. It loaded up the first time.

 

It actually didn't end up working, though. I'm not sure if the problem was because of it being installed on a hard drive or not. I've ran into so many problems that I just kind of gave up instead of doing in-depth troubleshooting.

[thegoonfather]

I would follow the guide and install it to a usb stick. That’s how the developers designed it.

 

[Ezel]

On 4/12/2021 at 9:21 PM, GiffiCheez said:

Here are the specs:

Core 2 Duo E8600

4x2GB A-Tech DDR2 800Mhz

Quadro FX 3800

Crucial M4 128GB SATA SSD

some SATA hard drives

These look like some older specs, your motherboard might not support booting straight off a USB flash drive.

However you could try burning something like Plop boot manager to a CD or DVD.

I've used this in the past to boot USBs on older hardware with a BIOS that didn't support USB boot.

You can find how to burn this on to a CD here: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/full.html#runcd