At Wit's End with Trying to Boot from USB or DVD

Question

For about the past two weeks now I've been working on a project to salvage my 2011 Dell XPS 8300 from a hard drive failure. I've bought a new HDD and installed it, ran diagnostics and everything appears to be in good working order. The issue has been trying to get this thing to boot from a USB or my CD/DVD drive. The Windows 10 and Ubuntu boots have been created on a Mac and will not boot on my Dell. They work booting on the Mac, however. I've changed boots orders, tried different USB ports, flashed the bios, and numerous other things. The one success I've had however is installing FreeDOS to the dell and am able to use it. The one thing I haven't been able to try is us changing secure boot (I can't find it in my BIOS options anywhere). Sorry for the rambling message, but I hope someone can help.

DELL-Jesse L · Answer

mcb219, You need a Windows disk that is not created on a mac.  Also, Windows 10 is not supported by Dell on this computer. There are no Windows 10 drivers available for download.

mcb219 · Answer

I had Windows 10 on this machine before hard drive failure, so I'm a bit confused.

DELL-Jesse L · Answer

mcb219, Windows 10 may work on the computer but, Dell does not support Windows 10 on the XPS 8300. Dell did not create any Windows 10 drivers for the computer.

speedstep · Answer

You don't have UEFI bios so the UEFI GPT partitions will not boot on the 8300.  You need an OEM windows 10 DVD. https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Pro-64-bit-OEM/dp/B00ZSHDJ4O/

vtoy116 · Answer

UEFI GPT partitions have nothing to do with booting from USB or DVD. Try using Microsoft's Windows 10 Media Creation Tool on a Windows computer to create your boot USB drive.

speedstep · Answer

Windows 7 and above Require GPT partitions.

"boots have been created on a Mac and will not boot on my Dell"

Macintosh systems specifically use UEFI GPT partitions.

The support you are asking is not offered or available ever.

Ubuntu support comes from canonical not from dell.

Windows 10 is NOT supported but works on these systems via DVD MEDIA not usb media.

Burned or commercial DVD media booting and install work.

USB booting "mac" media does not work and is not supported.

vtoy116 · Answer

Saying Windows 7 and above require GPT partitions is not completely true. It is only true if you have a UEFI BIOS. Since the OP has a XPS 8300 without UEFI, MBR partitions should work fine. Go to a firiend's Windows computer to create the USB boot drive. You may have to use a toot called Rufus: tinkertry.com/how-to-create-bootable-windows-10-flash-drives-for-clean-installs-on-legacy-and-uefi-pcs-including-surface-pro-3

speedstep · Answer

The Drives he is trying to use have UEFI GPT partitions they are from MACS.

Macs bootable windows flash drives have required UEFI since 2006.

USB Flash drives for Macs are not suitable for an XPS 8300.

speedstep · Answer

The statement is not false. It can be qualified with the Bios Class 2.3.1 UEFI requires GPT. However MBR FAT32/DOS partitions are NOT available for windows 7 or later installation.

The MSR is 100 meg for WIN7, its 350 meg for 8.x, its 500meg for windows 10. Clean Install None of these are FAT32 MBR.

NTFS is required for 7 and up. This is why the windows 7 media creation tool makes bootable NTFS USB flash Drives.

There is also the AHCI issue where it won't see drives with Advanced Format 4k sectors aka drives later than 2011 and over 120 Gigs.

That requires F6 mass storage drivers.

The user is trying WINDOWS 10 not Windows 7.

There is a specific reason that NTFS is required vs FAT32. In RIS (the predecessor to WDS), NTFS was required because it used Single Instance Storage (SIS) to reduce the total size of the files that were being stored for deployment. With the advent of WDS, SIS has been replaced by the WDS Image Store. If you look at the sizes of the WIM files in the Image Store, you'll see that they are considerably smaller than the corresponding WIM files on the original install media. That is due to the fact that the "WIM" files in WDS only contain the metadata required to restore the actual WIM file but not the actual file resources. The file resources are stored in a Resource WIM (RWM) file, one per Image Group. The RWM functions along the same lines as SIS in that duplicate files are not stored.

All of the above requires file system features and functions that are only available with NTFS, hence the requirement for it when using WDS. NTFS is not the only file system Windows can support or mount. Booting However for sysprepped images etc NTFS is the only choice.

vtoy116 · Answer

At least we agree that USB flash drives for Macs are not suitable for an XPS 8300, but your statement about GPT partitions being required for Windows is still false. Getting back to helping the OP with his original problem, the subject of this thread, find a Windows computer and create a USB boot drive with the instructions in the link previously posted.

vtoy116 · Answer

This is not helping the OP. You said the XPS 8300 doesn't have UEFI bios so the UEFI GPT partitions will not boot. So we need to get off the subject of GPT partitions and focus on what the OP needs to do which is to make a USB boot drive that works on his system.

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At Wit's End with Trying to Boot from USB or DVD

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