Hello! I'm at wits end here. I am trying what I thought was going to be a simple install of Centos 6.7 on a brand new Dell R730xd. However, I can't for the life of me figure out how to get it to actually boot from the USB drive media(s) I have created successfully.

I created multiple (now 3) different USB Drives with a few flavors of Centos 6.7 (minimal and 2 DVD.1.iso's) by downloading them from the mirror and using the dd command on my Mac. They all LOOK like they worked fine -- and the Mac certainly see's them when I plug them back into it.

I pop them into the front right USB slot -- and boot the R730xd. I hit the F11 Boot Menu -- and there is an option for "One-time UEFI Boot Option". I select that and I see an option to

Boot from Front USB Disk2: USB DRIVE

Perfect -- I select that. It continues booting but I get the message

Boot Fail: Boot from Front USB Disk2: USB DRIVE

Boot Fail:
Please make sure a compatible media device is inserted.

This is with all 3 USB drives with 2 different Centos 6.7 images!

Please help -- this is driving me nuts -- let alone my customer is wondering about my ability here. Rightly so maybe.

did you remove MS windows and the GARBAGE Microsoft calls "secureboot"



did you MAKE a bootable usb thumb drive?
coping the iso to it will not make it magically bootable
( see the install instructions on how to make a bootable thumb drive)

did you read the cent install instructions ?

and do you NEED!!!! the older 6 series ?
if not use the current CentOS 7.1

but keep in mind Cent like Redhat is a SERVER class operating system and was NEVER!!! designed to run on a laptop
most laptops will mostly work mostly well -- mostly ????

IS your laptop listed in the supported list ?

cent uses the redhat docs
https://access.redhat.com/documentat...erprise-linux/

John -- I'm sort of confused ..

I did read the CentOS install instructions -- many of them.

There was nothing on the USB drive at all .. before I did the "dd" command to copy the ISO to it. I thought "dd" was a low level thing and that it should have done the trick?

If I didn't make a proper bootable Centos USB drive -- I am not sure what steps to do then. I.e. make it "bootable".

I am only using my Mac to create the USB Drive(s) -- but I am trying to install them on a Dell R730xd server. Not sure that was clear. It's the Dell who won't boot from the USB drive.

If you've verified the usb stick boots in other machines, then follow John's advice and find the setup setting to disable secure boot.. A new Dell machine likely has Secure Boot enabled in UEFI. Most computers have a setup feature to disable secure boot, but that's something you do in the hardware setup, not in software.

As an aside, Microsoft didn't create secure boot, they simply made it a requirement for newer versions of windows. A consortium of vendors led by Intel designed UEFI. Some newer linux distributions support secure boot, but I don't believe CentOS 6.x is one that does. Also a bootable usb needs to contain a uefi secure boot loader to boon on a system where secure boot is enabled.

Update -- if I switch the R730xd Boot BIOS option from UEFI to "BIOS" -- it now can boot from the USB stick and present the Centos 6 boot install screen. However, I need UEFI BIOS because I have 12 TB of local disk. So still not sure what to do here.

I checked and Secure Boot was disabled. So it appears to be a matter of UEFI being the boot "BIOS" instead of "BIOS" .