Using UNETBootin to install Linux Mint on a line of Dell Optiplex 760s
 

Hopefully this is right place for this.

I've used UNETBOOTIN to configure a USB stick with Linux Mint and am trying to install it on about 25 old Dell Optiplexes that can't run Windows 7. The process has worked on about 8 of the 25 computers. The others get the blue screen that asks how you want to boot (where you'd normally select Start Linux Mint so that you can run the install executable) and then it just sits at that menu forever.

I've tried taking the hard drive out of a "bad" computer and putting it into a "good" computer that installed Linux Mint properly. The install works fine on the good computer with a bad drive, but as soon as I put that previously bad drive (that now has Mint installed on it) back into the bad computer, it just sits at a blinking cursor forever (I've left it overnight). At this point, I'm at a loss as to what else to try. Is there some way I can boot some kind of diagnostics to see what problem its having with booting? It definitely seems to be a hardware problem, even though my understanding of the Optiplex line is that they're supposed to be identical hardware-wise.

Check the BIOS settings on the grumpy computers, especially the boot order, and compare these setting with a computer that worked OK. Also check the BIOS versions as some may be updated and others may not....

Thanks, that seems to at least be a road we haven't investigated before. The ones that aren't working are a different BIOS version than the ones that are. I'll try to update a couple and report back. thanks for the quick response!

If all of these systems are exact (and almost never really are) then boot or bios settings could be to blame.

Sometimes you have to boot directly to bios to get bios to see usb flash as a bootable device. It is almost always a hard drive choice.


I'd have just dd'ed the image to the usb for this task to instead of unetbooten.

dd'ed? It's booting off of the USB drive just fine (in both cases where it works and where it doesn't), it's once I've got it installed on the hard drive that it's not booting, which is possibly a bios issue; trying to figure that out now.

While an update to the BIOS probably would have solved the problem, we ended up having issues with that, but found something on another forum called "C States Control". Disabling that (under Performance Settings in the BIOS menu) allowed us to boot from the drive with Linux previously installed, as well as boot from unetbootin to start the install. Without the nudge to investigate the BIOS, we wouldn't have found the solution, so thank you!

"it's once I've got it installed on the hard drive that it's not booting, w" Oh sorry, I misunderstood. Thought wasn't booting to usb issue. So you are saying that all machines boot to usb and then on reboot they won't work?

I'd think it unlikely that a bios update would fix your issue as well as c-state change.

If you can boot to installer and it seems to install then reboot issue then I'd think your install went bad by some of many ways or some boot order issue/grub issue.

C states disable worked for me too.
 

Thanks all for this discussion. I couldn't get one of three Optiplex 760's to load linux and after using a proxy machine to install linux on the stubborn 760 hdd it still wouldn't boot linux. Disabling C States control fixed the Linux boot and I assume I could now install in that machine now, another day I'll throw a clone win 7 hdd in and try.