Poweredge R630 USB boot

D'Agger

Recently ordered a Dell Poweredge R630 with no CD drive as we always boot from USB

Went to do so & encountered some issues - USB wasn't showing as a boot option. Ensured everything to do with the USBs was enabled, still no show. Exhausted a number of other avenues & it looks as though you have to go by CD or use idrac enterprise to push the ISO - this is an enterprise software offered by Dell

When I rang tech support I was told you can't boot from USB as a security feature and to use idrac

Completely at a loss as per how to resolve, just wondering if anybody has experienced similar?

Will contact Dell once again for clarification but it seems as though you can't boot from USB on this range of servers which is absolutely laughable IMO

roast

Did ye get one with the internal USB addon board?

opus

That's very strange, we've a raft of Dell boxes (r715 r815 & c6145) and they all boot from USB no problem. When you hit the F key for the BIOS boot menu it doesn't show the flash drive 'til you scroll to the disk drive option AFAIR.

ED E

D'Agger wrote: »

Will contact Dell once again for clarification but it seems as though you can't boot from USB on this range of servers which is absolutely laughable IMO

If they didn't contain an IPMI, maybe, but they do. Downside with Dell is its not free to use even though you've bought the hardware.

With an IPMI you don't need to find a USB key, generate and write a bootable, plug in and let it slowly load, you just point it to a file on your laptop or workstation and away she flies. You can install the OS only power and ethernet connected.

D'Agger

Sound for the replies all, I got fairly petulant when I discovered you can't fire on an OS image via USB, I've since setup the idra/ipmi tool so I can remote to the server so now that I'm not having to spend my day under cooling fans I'm more relaxed about it!

IDRAC seems quite handy in fairness but it's still not working for me - I really hope I'm just missing something incredibly simple here but I'm connecting to the server, setting up a virtual CD drive pointing at my own running Daemon tools with the iso

Have set the server to point at virtual CD drive & set next boot to virtual cd/iso but when I reboot, despite showing briefly that virtual devices are attached, it continues through to the same old 'Booting from Hard drive C:' error so I've made a bit of progress but still not happy when you consider back in the good old days I'd have this installed with a few VMs running by now....ah well

sysninja

This is for all that have not found a solution.....
That is kind of silly that Dell told you that?? Rather they are kind of silly.
Here is the fix.
Goto iDRAC under Hardware =>Configure USB Management Port => find USB management port mode select => Standard OS use. Also under iDRAC managed: USB XML Configuration select => disable
Now reboot and bam!!