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I have an old XW8000 machine that I’ve been trying and failing boot from USB for the last week.

I’ve tried burning Ubuntu 6.0, 8.0, 14.0, 22.04 on USB media using PowerIso and BalenaEtcher and the usb is just not being booted from on the machine. I thought maybe it was the type of file system so I changed from FAT, FAT32, NTFS. Didn’t work.

So then I burned the .iso to cd drive and system booted right up. I went to BIOS and looked at every option to allow boot from USB and tried enabling it, still nothing.

I even tried pressing F8 on boot up and manually forcing the computer to boot from removable media- still nothing.

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  • I think a question about booting from USB media on computers that have no such capability in the BIOS would be interesting, useful and on-topic, but it would also be too different from the question formulated here for me to be comfortable editing this one into it. Commented Mar 13, 2024 at 11:20

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  • Adding manufacturer and type of machine might help others to identify what this is about.

According to Google the XW8000 seems be an early 2000s PC by HP. Is that right?

Are you sure it's even capable of booting from USB? Being able to do so is a rather recent development. Originally, USB was seen as only for input devices (keyboard and mice) - at least on desktop systems.

The manual I found does not mention USB as a bootable medium, only HD or optical or any PCI with a boot ROM (USB is explicitly mentioned as not having an option ROM).

  • Describing what options exactly have been tried might also help.

Such as what option that mysterious F8 gave. 'Removable media' for a 2000-era PC most likely means floppy or CD/DVD, not USB.

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  • @StephenKitt, "common" is also not the same thing as "reliable". I wouldn't be surprised if an early USB boot system was only tested to confirm that it could boot the board's BIOS updater. Commented Mar 12, 2024 at 1:48
  • @StephenKitt Server/Workstation boards are usually bought for reliable performance/stability, not cutting edge development. New features are usually only added with some delay. So yeah,might be just a little bit too old ... would be worth to check if there have been updates. Commented Mar 12, 2024 at 2:12
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    It seems that there was a BIOS update from HP in 2005. Unlikely that it added new features like USB boot, but it might have fixed certain bugs, so if the system can not boot from USB because of a bug, it's worth updating. Commented Mar 12, 2024 at 7:45
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    Clarifying questions ought to be put in comments, not in answer posts. I would imagine you would learn it by now. Commented Mar 12, 2024 at 10:19
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Assuming XW8000 is the HP workstation of the same name, chances are it wasn't bootable via USB. One option to consider would be the Plop bootloader (v5) which can be downloaded here: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

As long as you can boot from a floppy you should be able to install it, and once it's installed on the MBR it then can provide the ability to boot from USB on a lot of machines.

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It seems your system is from the early 2000s, 2003 at the latest (in its initial release). The ability to boot from USB was specified in the USB mass storage bootability spec, which was finalised in 2004 and published for public consumption later that year. While there were some systems capable of booting from USB in 2003 (based on drafts of the specification), it’s not surprising that your system can’t do so.

In those days, operating systems didn’t support booting from USB either; plain DOS could, but that was thanks to floppy or hard drive emulation in the BIOS, and that didn’t help protected-mode operating systems. As one data point, Debian only added support for booting its installer from USB in 2005.

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