During last year’s pandemic, I was bored at home and started tinkering with soft routers and DIY NAS devices. The system I played with the most was Xpenology, the unofficial Synology setup.
For that purpose, I bought two Snail Star machines, a B Dual and a C. The B Dual became a soft router, while the C was used for Xpenology. A year later, work has left me with little time to tinker, and for data safety and convenience I bought a QNAP NAS earlier this year. As the saying goes, after enough Xpenology tinkering, you eventually move to real Synology. But QNAP is simply much better value for money, so I shamelessly defected.
Yesterday, on a whim, I wanted to flash the Snail Star B Dual that had been gathering dust in the corner into an Xpenology machine, to use as cold backup storage for important data. It would stay powered off most of the time and only be turned on for backup. Since my B Dual had always been used as a soft router, I had never installed Xpenology on it. But because Snail Star machines have similar hardware, I naively assumed that the existing Xpenology boot USB from the C machine would work directly.
Of course, I ran into trouble.
During the new system installation, the progress would always reach 56% and then throw error 13: “System installation failed. The file may be corrupted (13).” To solve it, I tried many methods, including formatting all drives, including the SSD, and switching between different official and unofficial DSM installation packages. None of them worked. Error 13 remained.
In the end, with advice from someone in a Telegram group, I finally solved it. The cause was simple: the motherboard BIOS settings were wrong. Connect a keyboard and monitor, enter the BIOS during boot, usually by pressing DEL when the motherboard logo appears, then go to Advanced -> Miscellaneous Configuration -> OS Selection and change Win 7 to Win 8.x.
After half a day of work, the solution turned out to be this simple. I am recording it here so later beginners do not waste time the way I did. This is not really much of a tutorial, just a note.