Poweredge 1850 trying to boot from USB Help please

Question

Hi All

I am presently trying to install Windows Server 2008 on a spare poweredge 1850 server.

I have an ISO image which i have first burnt to DVD.

I have then formatted Pen Drive using NTFS and i copied the contents to an 8GB USB Pen Drive.

The File system on the USB Pen Drive is NTFS (FAT32 Hangs and does nothing after the final boot sequence BMC)

The bios settings are as follows

Boot Sequence

1)Embedded VIRTUALFLOPPY

2)Embedded VIRTUALCDROM

All the rest have been disabled

Hard Drive Disk Seqence

USB Hard Disk Emulation

Flash drive Emulation is set to Auto

when i try floppy emulation I have tried floppy and hard disk emulation also but to no avail

But every time i reboot i get the following error message

F1 Retry Boot F2 Setup

when i try floppy emulation i get following error message

A Disk Read error occured

Just to make sure i was reding all the bios info correctly i set it to Floppy as first boot and inserted an old DOS disk and the server correctly booted in Dos with CD Rom support.

Can Anyone tell me why it will not boot to USB Pen Drive, it's driving me Mad.

Suppose my question is, i am presuming it is possible to install Windows Server 2008 via USB Pen Drive?

Baz_Woodhams · Accepted Answer

Thanks quick response. Two Problems here The making of the disk bootable and also choosing Hard Disk C: as boot option Thanks now working

theflash1932 · Answer

Yes, it is possible, but it is not just formatting and drag-and-drop:http://jesscoburn.com/archives/2007/10/15/installing-windows-2008-via-usb-thumbdrive/

theflash1932 · Answer

You said you have it working now, so I'm not sure how you got around the problems you talked about, but ...

The steps in the tutorial I linked in my last post also makes it bootable ... nothing more to do.

You can also make the disk bootable after simply "copying" the files to a flash drive the long way by using Microsoft's bootsect.exe and/or Windows 7 USB Tool may also work.

Baz_Woodhams · Answer

Apart from making the USB bootable below are the steps i took

1. Start>>>Run>>>CMD

2) DISKPART

3. LIST DISK

4. DISK 1 (with your disk number)

5. CLEAN

6. CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

7. SELECT PARTITION 1

8. ACTIVE

9. FORMAT FS=NTFS

10 .ASSIGN

11. EXIT

But my main problem is i had mistakenly took VirtualFloppy as the boot device that would be used for the USB(within then BIOS) and completely missed the C: as the boot option.

Feel a bit foolish but for some reason had assumed that c: would be the SCSI device. Yes i know!!!!!

Thanks for help

theflash1932 · Answer

Ah ... I see.  We all feel a bit foolish now and again :) Take care.

PowerEdge Hardware General

Poweredge 1850 trying to boot from USB Help please

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