I purchased a Dell Precision 3460 a few months ago and discovered I can not boot anything from its cd drive or USB stick, I still have to try PLOP when I have a bit of spare time as I want to get rid of its Windows OS.

However, I read an article in which one has successfully booted from a bootable CD disk installed in an external CD drive (presumably through a USB port).

Has anyone any success/advice/experience in such procedure?

Thank you for your help.

can you net install? check your BIOS for your options

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"Dell Precision 3460"
Might need more info on this.

A system that is very old may need a very old distro made for that era.
If it is that old you may have an old bios that see's usb as a usb and not a hard drive choice.

I'd boot to bios while a known working usb bootable is installed as see what bios might view it as. Look at hard drive.

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It's probably due to secure boot, you will need to get into the BIOS/UEFI program & alter it, just know what you did, (make a written note of anything you change), so that you can revert it, if necessary.

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Did you try looking at Dell's website??
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals...fc5&lang=en-us
https://www.dell.com/community/Preci...n/td-p/7882070

You don't tell us anything about the age of this system, or what it is you're trying to boot (assuming Linux, but unknown version/distro). PLOP is useful for very, VERY old machines; shouldn't be needed on newer machines.

Maybe its CD drive is busted.
Plug in some other internal DVD drive or CD drive.
If it is IDE, you know how to configure the jumpers.

Also, no such thing as a BIOS that does not allow you to select a CD drive as the primary boot device.
If it is a PC from before 2005, I imagine boot from USB was pretty rare.

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I should have mentioned this, the Dell Precision 3460 was purchased brand new from Dell, total cost including tax, freight and insurance in .au dollars 4,013 (October 2022).
It seems the Bios of it are just made inaccessible. I can not netinst, it wont boot from CD or USB (used successfully to install on other machines) and a lot of things I tried months ago simply did not work. It also seems it is one of those machines where Windows has a monopoly.
There is a few answers worth trying but I do not have the required time now.
I spent days trying to get it to boot from CD or USB when I purchased it, even replacing SSD1 (it has 2) with a new SSD which seems to be a rare component of the machine that is not proprietary.

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Windows locks access to bios sometimes. I think it is the fastboot but hibernate can cause it.

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So a new machine; both of the links work just fine, and tell you how to get access to the boot/BIOS menus. That is either F2 (for system setup) or F12 (boot device options). So unless you got a machine that is somehow from Dell but NOT running Dell BIOS, those things work. Since you purchased the machine new not long ago, have you called Dell support??? Have you tried reading the manual that came with the computer??
SSD's aren't 'rare', and that machine takes a standard SSD; standard SATA:
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals...3f9&lang=en-us

I find it hard to believe you've been working for *EIGHT MONTHS* to try to get a PC to boot, without calling support for the machine (since it was/is under warranty), had the owners manual available to you (see links above) and this one which appears salient:
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals...c20&lang=en-us

If you were locked out from Windows (doubtful) you can reset it by creating/booting from a Windows ISO:
https://www.isunshare.com/windows-pa...ios-setup.html

You have a uefi bios.

put it up for sale on ebay and get something that works for you?

Disable fastboot in windows 10 advance power settings, what is name of iso and how did you put iso to usb?

My apologies for the delay but I am really short of time.
I can not remember what sort of manual was in the delivered box but, if there was, it was very thin. There was nothing to do, just plug and play. It was not a complete system, I purchased only the desktop as new because I found articles saying that Linux could be installed on the PC and even Dell claimed that they had nothing against Linux.

I followed all instructions I subsequently found on the internet, numerous time and absolutely nothing worked, the Windows OS works but seems to prevent anything else and I dislike Windows, I am not even using the machine.
Since that OS works, I have no legal claim under any warranty.

My following of the prompts to complain about the problem to Dell also did not work, if my recollection is correct, at the end of the line there was no suitable option to choose from (I am hearing-impaired).
Two emails that were successfully sent were never answered including one that was my answer to their "survey" about how happy I was about the purchase.
It seems that answer, not being a brilliant reference went to device null.

However this post was mainly about the proposition made that booting a usb stick from an external usb drive may produce a different result than booting the same usb stick inserted in a usb port of the machine. Since there is no answer in that respect, I must assume that it is probably not realistic or may just be accidental that it worked or made any difference.

Although the answers make a few suggestions about trying the BIOS again, unfortunately, I have a couple of other priorities before I can try again since it can not be done in a rush.
I live in a small Western Australian mining town and I was thinking about giving the machine to a not-for-profit rather than try to sell it.

Thank you all for the answers.

I did that. The USB stick I tried to boot from was formatted correctly as a bootable stick and was successfully used to netinst on two other machines.

I expect you have multiple USB ports so have you tried all of them? Some computers will have only one USB port which works to boot. Do you have the USB plugged in before booting the computer? Have you looked online for a manual for your computer or checked the links to the Dell site posted above in post 5?

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