When a Dell PowerEdge Refuses to Boot from a USB Drive

I wanted to install Debian on a PowerEdge R410 that I no longer used, so I created a bootable USB disk, but even after setting USB as the highest boot priority in the BIOS it would not boot from the USB, and I spent several hours on it.

When I looked for a solution on the internet, the article below was a perfect match

The boot solution

1. On the startup screen (while the Dell logo is showing), press F2 to open the BIOS setup screen.
2. In the BIOS settings, change USB Flash Drive Emulation Type from AUTO to Hard Disk.
3. Save the settings and leave the BIOS setup screen (it reboots)
4. On the startup screen (while the Dell logo is showing), press F11 to open the boot media selection.
5. In the boot media selection, the USB flash media appears under the “Hard Disk” entry, so choose to boot from the USB flash media.
6. The installer boots from the USB without trouble.

The network is unusable

The NIC is recognized, but it cannot connect to the network

Since packages cannot be installed from the Debian installer screen, the install finished with only the disk and password settings, leaving an almost bare login screen
Still, the install itself is complete, so logging in is possible

Installing the network driver

1. On another PC, download it from https://debian.pkgs.org/10/debian-nonfree-amd64/firmware-bnx2_20190114-2_all.deb.html and save it onto a USB drive
2. Plug that USB drive into the PowerEdge and mount it Look up the device name of the USB drive yourself

# mount /dev/sdx /mnt

3. Install the driver

# /usr/bin/dpkg -i firmware-bnx2_20190114-2_all.deb
# reboot

Note:
Even though the network became usable, there was no /etc/apt/sources.list either and I had to create it myself, so it may be easier to save that onto the USB drive together with the network driver

Incidentally, at this point ssh is not installed either, so transferring things over the network may be difficult

Once the network was enabled, I could run apt update with sources.list and carry out the usual package installation work for ssh, sudo, git and so on

The environment this time

PC: Dell PowerEdge R410
OS: debian-11.3.0-amd64-netinst
NIC Driver: debian-nonfree-amd64/firmware-bnx2_20190114-2_all.deb

See also