@thehomebiscuit Welcome to the Rockstor community
This can happen if the update was interrupted or failed for some reason, ie the Rockstor package updates but the kernel one doesn’t, or is still doing so, and so it’s just not there to boot into.
So again possibly with the failed / very slow updates. Although we have had a few hours on a few occasions when the updates server was down. But it hasn’t been for very long. If the server was down you would see something like what was expressed in the following thread:
and
There really isn’t a standard update channel, there is only testing or subscription based, ie see: Update Channels
That may be part of your problem. Prior to selecting one or the other there are no newer Rockstor packages offered as neither the testing or stable has yet been selected. This means you will only get regular upstream updates to almost everything except the Rockstor package, as it has not yet been established which channel you want. Hope that help to explain this part, if I get your meaning here. All other updates (excluding the Rockstor package, mosty) can be installed via the flashing icon to the left of the kernel version.
With this info it now sounds very much like you are using a regular cheap usb stick to do the install onto (ie as system disk). This is really never going to cut it as Rockstor is not, like many NAS OS’s, heavily cut down: in most other respects this is an advantage however. It’s essentially a full on CentOS linux install and so really does need the performance associated with fast USB sticks such as the SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 (an ssd on a stick with sata-to-usb bridge essentially with ssd like performance) or a proper ssd / hdd as otherwise the results are problematic (stuff can times out all over the place). Plus it takes hours to install rather than minutes, which is another indication of the differences between these types of devices.
I’d say try a regular hdd/ssd system disk on your real hardware and see how you go. Also do give the initial update plenty of time to complete prior to the first reboot as there are tones of packages to go in and setup which can take several minutes even on fast hardware.
It is appreciated that there is insufficient feedback on the state of the update and this is something we have an issue open for:
and the forum link from that issue may be of interest.
Hope that helps and if not please post the output of the following commands run as the root user from the terminal:
yum info rockstor
and
yum update