Unraid USB Creator for Mac

Writes Unraid OS to a USB flash drive, and personalises it before first boot — server name, network configuration and Wi-Fi — so the server comes up ready on your network. Download for Windows, macOS and Linux from the releases page. New to Unraid? Start with the Unraid documentation.

Unraid flash drives and licensing

An Unraid licence is bound to a GUID derived from the USB flash drive's vendor id, product id and serial number. The creator shows that GUID next to each drive so you can check it before writing, and tells you when a GUID is already registered — in that case the drive still works, and the server may still be licensable using TPM.

Unraid boots from USB flash specifically, so only USB devices are offered as targets.

Legacy BIOS boot

The drive this produces boots on UEFI systems as written. Older BIOS-only hardware also needs a syslinux boot sector, which is not installed automatically. To add it, run the matching script from the root of the drive:

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md for build instructions, and PORTING.md for how this fork is structured and how to rebase it onto a newer upstream release.

Relationship to Raspberry Pi Imager

This is a fork of rpi-imager by Raspberry Pi Ltd, used under the Apache 2.0 licence. Upstream does the heavy lifting — the imaging engine, drive enumeration and the setup wizard — and the Unraid-specific work sits on top of it as an additive layer.

The fork is deliberately kept small and greppable so upstream releases can be merged rather than re-applied by hand. git grep "UNRAID:" enumerates the entire patch surface; the rules are in PORTING.md.

For the Linux release pipeline — the rootless, multi-architecture chroot build that produces the AppImages and .deb packages — see doc/linux-build.md.

Other notes

Custom repository

Starting the application with --repo [your own URL] uses a custom image repository, so you can point it at your own list of images.

Anonymous metrics (telemetry)

Telemetry is disabled in Unraid USB Creator builds. Upstream rpi-imager collects anonymous usage metrics by default; this fork is built with ENABLE_TELEMETRY=OFF and no telemetry endpoint configured, so nothing is collected or sent.