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Optiplex 9010 won't boot to USB 2.0?
We've had several dozen Optiplex 9010s delivered recently, and we've seen mixed results getting them to boot to USB.
On all the PCs I tested I can successfully get them to boot to a USB 3 external hard drive, but any USB 2.0 drives fail. We see the BIOS error "Remove disks or other media" when it attempts to hand control over to the device. These 2.0 drives use a Grub4DOS boot menu, and work without issue on all previous Dell PCs we have in house. We have all kinds of bootable USB drives, some formatted with NTFS, some with FAT32, some formatted as FDD, and some as HDD. We've recreated the MBRs on the 2.0 drives time and time again, but with the same result - they boot fine on any other machine, but only their USB 3 counterpart will successfully boot on the 9010.
So far all of the machines have been set to "Raid On" in the BIOS, but none of the ones I tested have used the AF hard drives. However, a colleague of mine got a test machine with an AF drive to test his image, and that machine boots to USB 2.0 without issue... All PCs involved have the same BIOS version, and are set to Raid On, the only physical difference has been the presence of the AF hard drive.
Any thoughts?
MU_Ryan
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September 5th, 2012 06:00
Hi! Thanks for replying to my question, but fortunately I've had a Eureka! moment this week. All of the USB drives I'd been trying were from the same manufacturer, and were all the same specs. My external HDD worked fine, so I tried a couple of 512MB drives from a third manufacturer and they work fine, too! It seems that the problem lies with the single brand of USB sticks (they were a custom job we ordered a few years back for incoming students).
I can work with this, as I have a plethora of USBs lying around the office. :-)
Thanks again! I consider this issue resolved now.
DELL-John C
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September 5th, 2012 02:00
Hi there,
Sorry for the delay in getting in touch as I've just been made aware of your thread.
What I think the best course of action to take at the moment is if you can send me 2 of the Optiplex 9010 service tags - if you can give me the service tag of one of the 9010s that doesn't boot to USB 2.0 drives and also give me the service tag of the 9010 that has the AF hard drive. This will help me greatly and may show some slight differences in specification that could account for this problem.
If you can accept my friend request and send me the service tags via private message, it would be a great help.
Thanks!
DELL-John C
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September 5th, 2012 06:00
Hi there,
Glad you managed to figure this one out! If you don't mind, can you tell me the manufacturer of the USB drives? That way, I can pass this up the chain for their consideration.
Thanks, hope to hear from you soon!
MU_Ryan
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September 5th, 2012 06:00
I believe they were an "Alcor" brand. They're labelled with our school brand, and came pre-formatted with a weird faux CD-ROM partition that appeared as an actual disk drive in the Windows environment. We had to identify the chipsets and download an Alcor utility to get rid of those partitions at one point, which could be related to this odd behavior. It's worth noting, however, that they've booted fine on all previous Dell Optiplex models we've used at this time.
Hope this helps!
DELL-John C
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September 6th, 2012 04:00
Hi there,
Thank you very much for this, I'll see if I can pass this on to our Engineering team. It seems like it's just one of those weird unforeseeable bugs that sometimes crop up but I'm glad that you managed to get to the root cause of the problem.
If there's anything else we can do for you, please keep us in mind! Thanks again for your time.
DELL-Roshan L
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May 30th, 2013 04:00
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