GRUB doesn't find flash drive w/ 24.10

Running dual-boot w/ 24.04.1 and WIN11 on a Dell 5502. When booting the flash drive w/ 24.10 is not presented. Turning safe boot off doesn’t help. I don’t know what I’ve missed.

thanx,

If this happens when you have set the flash drive to first boot in the BIOS, can you test boot it on another machine to eliminate the flash drive as a problem? What software method did you use to write 24.20 to the flash drive? Were any warning/error messages show in the process?

Thanks for the quick reply.

I can’t set the flash drive to first in UEFI because it isn’t there at all. When booting
normally GRUB displays 5 choices. UEFI also displays 5. It isn’t there to reorder.

I wrote 24.10 to the flash drive (this is the second one) with the UBUNTU native
start-up disk creator. No messages. While I did not do a checksum of the download
if there were an error tht would be an error downstream,

Just tried the flash drive in an old HP lapdog running 22.xx.x LTS and it worked.
Good suggestion!

So, I need to know what I’ve missed on the Dell Inspiron.

thanks,

I have Dell 5310 with Intel 11th Gen chip. While it says BIOS, it is UEFI and once in “BIOS” it says UEFI only. I would make sure to create a UEFI bootable flash drive.
Some just fine a different installer or different flash drive then work.

Some find Rufus works, others balenaEtcher, also mksub
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/iso2usb

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu#1-overview

Hello oldfred:

The third link that you provided is what I used to create my startup disk. In fact I did it twice using two different media. On the Dell machine where I have the difficulty I also tried booting using two different USB ports.

A reminder: the USB stuck did indeed work on an old HP laptop running 22.xx.x LTS. I quit after I saw the “UBUNTU 20 YEARS” logo. I genuinely believe that I have a bootable drive.

I have now noticed behaviour that I don’t understand. When I plug the USB stick into the port I see two entries when looking with the “FILES” app. The first entry’s name is “Ubuntu 24.10 amd64” which looks appropriate. The second apparent device is called “writable”. If I eject the first “device” the second one disappears too.

My status now is:
• I believe that I’ve got a working bootable drive, and
• even with safe boot off I am not presented with the USB drive choice on the Dell machine.

What shall I do next?

thanx,

With Dell you boot flash drive installer with f12. If not seen, then often issue with flash drive configuration. It seems some installers work better for some systems than others. I might just try another installer. Grub does not normally show boot of USB flash drive. You would have to add a boot stanza to 40_custom. I have only extracted ISO to FAT32 partition or flash drive with boot,esp flags in past. Normally I directly boot ISO with grub2’s loopmount.

Do you mean Secure Boot?

Secondly, in your UEFI settings, do you have Fastboot (or similar)?
This setting can prevent the PC from recognising a USB device until after the OS has booted.

Do you have another UEFI setting to enable/disable booting from external sources?

Did you boot the flash drive on the old HP in UEFI or Legacy mode? You mention trying to boot from 2 different usb ports. Do you have more usb ports? Try them all as some computers will have multiple usb ports but only one will boot.

Sorry I’ve taken so long. I certainly do not mean to take you folks for granted.

First, I installed a new “startup disk creator”, specifically mksub, from mkusb - Community Help Wiki .

Second, I turned off “secure boot” and changed “deployed mode” to “audit mode”.

I did not change “UEFI boot path security” as it only seemed to effected use of the non-existant admin password.

For “fastboot” I tried both “minimal” and “thorough”. “Auto” apparently is either so I didn’t try that.

Booting UEFI both w/ and w/o F12 the option to “add boot option” seems to be the same. The choices presented did not include the USB stick. They are in 2 pictures:

Thanks.

I don’t know what to try next.

Thanks!!

Can you show a picture of USB Configuration in the UEFI (BIOS) settings?
Enable USB Boot Support?
Enable External USB port?

UEFI boot entry is by label/name of flash drive.
What is No Volume label entry, or is flash drive some generic brand?

UEFI entries use partUUID or GUID to know which partition to boot from.
Your UEFI entries show the partuuid. Compare to this, if it shows USB drive.
lsblk -e 7 -o name,fstype,size,fsused,label,partlabel,mountpoint,uuid,partuuid

Thanks all. I finally got some new media and using a new flash drive worked.