Booting Woes

> This server is an Inspiron 560s from 2008.

> I don't know why, but no matter what I have tried I just can't get the BIOS to recognize my USB. The machine is old enough that it doesn't know what UEFI is, but the one time I was able to get the machine to recognize the drive was when it was formatted with GPT which should be UEFI only. I have spent hours making tweaks and re-imaging that poor USB stick to no avail.

gemini://benjaminja.info//log/2024/01/16-upgrading_server/

A range of Dell equipment (and some random HP desktops, too)† showed varied results for booting; older equipment that "supports" UEFI may tend towards buggy behavior (try BIOS instead) while the newer equipment tended towards the BIOS being buggy (try UEFI instead). One might suspect that the new thing has errors because new, and the old thing bitrots as it falls off the support wagon, untested and unloved. There may be various relevant BIOS options to fiddle around with—"secure" boot, whether USB is supported for booting, boot order, press a custom key for a boot menu and only then from there, phase of the moon, etc. Put together a list of things to toggle, change one of them, try a boot, repeat lots.

Sometimes the hardware is broken, though to figure that out you may need multiple instances of the device: just this one, or all of them?

Look for BIOS updates, as those may fix bugs (and security issues).

Also the boot media may have been made incorrectly; maybe try using the image to boot a virtual machine. There are complications here such as getting the boot bit set aright, and getting the bits written to the whole image and not some random existing partition. Some operating systems (OpenBSD in particular) have distinct "image" files (USB only, for what used to be a floppy) versus ISO files (CD-ROM only) though last I checked Linux tended towards hybrid media that, in theory, will work for either case.

Another option might be to network boot the device. This usually goes by the name of "PXE boot" or automated installation. This however may be too complicated to setup if you've only got that one computer, as you need to run and configure various network services to make it happen. PXE is really handy if you have lots and lots of systems you want installed the same way, or if you try out installing lots of virts. I guess other folks use image files? (The Windows admins shipped a 40G image to their many hosts, which resulted in the network group killing network ports a few times due to "too much traffic", and then the installs would have to be restarted from scratch. Computers have, somehow, made us more productive.) Network install automation has a high capital cost for (mostly) smooth sailing once you get it set up.

it's not kickstart?

Or, install to a hard drive on a working system, then physically move that drive to the problematic system and see if it boots off that.

† Sysadmin, especially unix sysadmin, tend to acquire piles of old and mostly working systems, as a 20 year old system will, probably, run OpenBSD or whatever just fine. With a network switch or even a hub‡ you can then build a small test network, have a computer for wiping disks on, etc. The "probably" qualification is that old drivers are at times removed from new operating systems to save on boot image space. Maybe try a different OS; the last clunker laptop I put Debian 12 on installed fine over the wifi, but then did rf kills on that same wifi once booted into the OS. Alpine Linux had no such issues.

‡ Yes, there were people using 10/100 Ethernet hubs and they complained about the network speed. The wall ports were all 1000… naturally, folks were either on outdated network equipment, or used the slow wifi that had broadcasts configured in such a way that apparently drained batteries. Someone else who had one of those phone things had complained about this. No, I didn't manage that wifi, though a battery draining wifi network does seem like a good way to help keep people off their phones.