Alternate Booting Methods

[WeeboTech]

Anyone interested in alternate methods in booting your unRAID server?

 

Just trying to find out what might be useful for others.

 

This is probably only something worth while as a backup or for developers.

 

I just got so tired of rebooting and waiting for the flash to read/load that I started to look into alternate methods.

My other reason was to leverage some old hardware to use as an unRAID nas (for some of my friends).

I see this more in need for that old hardware that does not have USB boot capability.

The other reason for these emergency floppies is to allow you to boot unraid should you USB Key go south.

You'll still have the issue of mounting it to /boot which may fail, but if you periodically backup your key, it can be restored quickly.

 

So far I've made

A bootable CDROM to bring up unRAID and also a bunch of floppy based tools.

 

A Grub floppy that will allow you to boot bzimage/bzroot from one of your hard disks

(this requires that you backup your /boot flash periodically to a directory)

It boot from disk 1-6 if you backup your /boot directory to /mnt/disk?/boot

I believe this requires the grub package installed and the stage2 files installed to /boot/grub.

 

I built a freedos diskette that boots grub4dos which works like grub, but does not require the stage 2 files installed in /boot/grub.

This has an editor on it so you can customize it to boot from the hard drive you choose.

 

My final goal is to update the bootable CDROM with a number of tools to enable you to

1. Boot unraid as is from CDROM

3. Boot grub4dos to use some of those facilties.

4. Boot Grub (again as a utility).  Remember grub can be installed to your hard drive, so you could in theory boot the CD, Boot grub, install it to your hard drive, then boot unraid from your hard drive. (cache?)

5. Boot freedos to access the CDROM drive to create real flioppies from the floppy image files on the CD.

6. Boot freedos with USB driver utilities for accessing your USB Flash.

Also allowing you to format and prepare your USB stick.

 

In any case I have grub4dos via floppy and grub via floppy working.

I had a freedos utility diskette able to access the flash media as a drive.

I tested loadlin, but it just did not succeed in booting unraid.

The kernel loads and the rootramdisk loads, but then it hangs.

 

There is also a way to put grub4dos on your boot flash and actually have grub4dos be a menu item in the syslinux.cfg.

This would allow you to select booting from the hard drive too. (Plus floppy images from your flash).

Where this comes in hand is for diagnostic (or dos) floppy images on your USB stick.

Case in point, The Seatools diskette or the Western Digital Diagnostic Diskette.

 

My reason for posting is to see what people think is worthwhile to help and what tools to put on this CDROM .iso if possible.

So far I'm considering.

 

rawwrite and rawritewin (which allow the floppy images to be written to a floppy drive via dos/windows).

unzip (for unpacking the unraid distribution).

 

The freedos diskette image has

fdisk, format, edit, syslinux.com, grub4dos, bootlace(for grub).

 

I was thinking of including the HP USB formatting tool (but it's windows)

and possibly the syslinux tool mkdiskimage to help format a USB drive from Linux.

 

Thoughts? Any Utility?

 

 

[brainbone]

I was thinking of including the HP USB formatting tool (but it's windows)

and possibly the syslinux tool mkdiskimage to help format a USB drive from Linux.

 

From my experience, makebootfat will accomplish what the HP USB utility set outs to do for unRAID, except that makebootfat actually works -- and I believe you can build a linux binary from the source package.

 

 

[WeeboTech]

Thanks, that was helpful, I'll try it out.

[jupilerman]

Anyone interested in alternate methods in booting your unRAID server?

 

Just trying to find out what might be useful for others.

 

This is probably only something worth while as a backup or for developers.

 

I just got so tired of rebooting and waiting for the flash to read/load that I started to look into alternate methods.

My other reason was to leverage some old hardware to use as an unRAID nas (for some of my friends).

I see this more in need for that old hardware that does not have USB boot capability.

The other reason for these emergency floppies is to allow you to boot unraid should you USB Key go south.

You'll still have the issue of mounting it to /boot which may fail, but if you periodically backup your key, it can be restored quickly.

 

So far I've made

A bootable CDROM to bring up unRAID and also a bunch of floppy based tools.

 

 

Yes, i'm very interested. Because my old  hardware takes almost 14 minutes to boot from the usb stick.

But from a cd, it will only take 30-40 seconds.

So, a bootable cd is what i'm looking for.

Even if I have to let the usb plug for the licence.

 

If i can boot in less than 1 minute, i'm shure, i will buy unRAID.

 

Where can I download the cd ?

[Greg F]

I'm thinking of putting some old hardware back to work.  However, my motherboard does not support booting from USB. Is it possible to make a bootable CD, or even to boot Unraid from a hard drive. My motherboard has onboard SCSI support, so I could put unraid on a scsi drive, then use PCI sata ports for the unraid hard drives.

 

[WeeboTech]

I'm thinking of putting some old hardware back to work.  However, my motherboard does not support booting from USB. Is it possible to make a bootable CD, or even to boot Unraid from a hard drive. My motherboard has onboard SCSI support, so I could put unraid on a scsi drive, then use PCI sata ports for the unraid hard drives.

 

Yes, it is possible to create a bootable CD with isolinux.

In the past I've booted unRAID from a hard drive by doing a syslinux to the hard drive from another system.

I've also used a compact flash and an IDE adapter to do the initial boot.

In addition I created a bootable floppy with grub4dos which then loaded the bzroot and bzimage from a hard drive.

 

The real issue is getting unRAID to boot in the first place to copy these files to a hard drive.

 

 

 

[Greg F]

How does this work with the license file, which matches the serial number of my USB key? If I'm not using the USB key, does the license file still work?

[Joe L.]

How does this work with the license file, which matches the serial number of my USB key? If I'm not using the USB key, does the license file still work?

You can boot off of anything you can make work, but the USB key must still exist and it must have the UNRAID label and it must have the license key file in the config folder. (It will be mounted at /boot)

 

You do not have to have the bzroot and bzimage files on the flash drive.  They will be on whatever you boot from.

 

Joe L.

[jupilerman]

You can boot off of anything you can make work, but the USB key must still exist and it must have the UNRAID label and it must have the license key file in the config folder. (It will be mounted at /boot)(...)

Joe L.

I need some help with this.

I boot from a old 10G hard drive with a 4G fat32 partition labeled UNRAID.

It's working perfectly BUT it doesn't mount the USB key (sda1) at /boot but the HD (hda1).

In this case, it doesn't recognise my pro licence becaused the USB key is not mounted as the UNRAID drive.

 

I try this for a week now but i can't make the unraid boot from the HD and use the config from the USB key.

 

any tips will be well appreciate.

[Joe L.]

You can boot off of anything you can make work, but the USB key must still exist and it must have the UNRAID label and it must have the license key file in the config folder. (It will be mounted at /boot)(...)

Joe L.

I need some help with this.

I boot from a old 10G hard drive with a 4G fat32 partition labeled UNRAID.

It's working perfectly BUT it doesn't mount the USB key (sda1) at /boot but the HD (hda1).

In this case, it doesn't recognise my pro licence becaused the USB key is not mounted as the UNRAID drive.

 

I try this for a week now but i can't make the unraid boot from the HD and use the config from the USB key.

 

any tips will be well appreciate.

Try this:

 

First, do not label the partition on the hard-disk as UNRAID, name it anything else, then do label the partition on the flash drive as UNRAID but do not put syslinux on it, you only need to use syslinux on your hard disk, as you probably already did. (and if the hard disk is already booting, you don't need to do anything more to it other than to change its volume label to somethinng other than UNRAID)

 

Then, let us know what the hard-disk gets mounted as... if it is mounted at all.

 

Joe L.

[jupilerman]

First, do not label the partition on the hard-disk as UNRAID, name it anything else

Man, why didn't I figure it out ?

Of course, UNRAID label is only for the usb key.

Now, it's working prefectly.

 

Thanks.