Problem booting a Dell from USB

[leke]

Hi, I got given a Dell AMD64 today and wanted to USB boot a couple of distros on it.
I prepared the disk as FAT32 with the boot flag and used UNetbootin to set up the live OS.
I can boot into the Unetbootin menu screen, but after selecting an option, the boot returns to the power on boot screen.
In my bios I noticed the usb stick is recognised as usb-zip. The other ones are usb-fdd and usb-device -- but these are not showing a connection to the usb stick.
Finally, the drive boots fine on another PC, so I don't think it's an issue with the USB distro.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[lok1950]

Does it have secure boot if so is it enabled in the BIOS?

Enjoy the Choice

[leke]

Does it have secure boot if so is it enabled in the BIOS?

Enjoy the Choice

I guess not as it's a older machine: http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/dell-o ... 46056.html

[dandnsmith]

My experience of a machine which showed those options for the usb device is that it probably wont boot directly from the stick.
If you had the stick set up to mimic a fdd (cf bootable CDs) it might work - I never tried that.
There is a work-around which involves creating a special CD to boot from, but this tends to work only on the one PC and may not be an option available to you.

[nelz]

But this is booting from the stick, it displays the unetbootin menu. Unetbootin is not 100% reliable, which distros are you trying to load and do they have their own USB booting systems?

Some distros now provide hybrid ISOs that can be copied ot a USB device with dd as well as burned to a disc. Others have their own way of creating a bootable USB stick, like Ubuntu's startup disk creator.

[leke]

I'm wanted to make this one a media-center and have ISOs of the following...

XBMCbuntu http://xbmc.org/download/
GeeXbox http://www.geexbox.org/
OpenELEC http://openelec.tv/ (which has it's own live boot but didn't work either): http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title ... nstall_Key

Perhaps I should try some alternatives to unetbootin. I'll check out this other ubuntu option.

Thanks

[dandnsmith]

Again I've misread - have to be more careful!

What about Multiboot - I've done multiple boots successfully (don't say this is the one you tried)
with it

[leke]

Again I've misread - have to be more careful!

What about Multiboot - I've done multiple boots successfully (don't say this is the one you tried)
with it

I didn't know about Multi-boot, but just before I read this, I managed to use the Ubuntu Start-up disk creator to get XBMCbuntu to boot and install. I'll try it out with geeXbox anyway.

Thanks

[leke]

The work-around for the problem with unetbootin was to manually add mem=1G to the command line.