Can't get PC to boot from USB thumb drive

[nobodynose]

I have an HP Z210 workstation that I thought I'd give a try installing Mountain Lion on. I don't have really high hopes of everything working on it, but I wanted to see how far I can get. Well, it turns out not too far - I can't get the damn thing to boot from a Unibeast USB thumb drive!

The BIOS supports booting from USB, and I do have it enabled in the settings. I've tried three different thumb drives and every one of the 9 USB ports on the machine, but it still doesn't give me USB as a choice to boot from when I hit F9 (the key to get the boot menu). My BIOS is up-to-date (I checked). Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[nobodynose]

I have an HP Z210 workstation that I thought I'd give a try installing Mountain Lion on. I don't have really high hopes of everything working on it, but I wanted to see how far I can get. Well, it turns out not too far - I can't get the damn thing to boot from a Unibeast USB thumb drive!

The BIOS supports booting from USB, and I do have it enabled in the settings. I've tried three different thumb drives and every one of the 9 USB ports on the machine, but it still doesn't give me USB as a choice to boot from when I hit F9 (the key to get the boot menu). My BIOS is up-to-date (I checked). Does anyone have any ideas?

Surely someone else has encountered this problem, maybe not with this particular hardware, but it seems like someone would have some ideas for me...

 

[Middleman]

Nobodynose,

You need to check if your USB stick is formatted correctly. From what I remember Unibeast must be formatted with MBR Partitioning selected in Disk Utility > Options but using Mac Journaled format...

If the USB stick still fails with the USB ports, the machine itself could have EFI-booting disabled with Mountain Lion, in which case the best way to install is via the iBoot 3.3.0 DVD (with a Mountain Lion DVD) OR via a USB hard disk drive which has the 10.8 OSX Installer installed onto it using xMove (check Tonymac Other Archives for this program). I've tried the iBoot DVD on HP laptops before with the Snow Leopard DVD and they work, so I assume it should work with yours too...

 

[nobodynose]

Nobodynose,

You need to check if your USB stick is formatted correctly. From what I remember Unibeast must be formatted with MBR Partitioning selected in Disk Utility > Options but using Mac Journaled format...

My USB sticks (all the ones I tried) were formatted correctly - that's the first thing I checked. And I got no errors creating the UniBeast sticks either.

If the USB stick still fails with the USB ports, the machine itself could have EFI-booting disabled with Mountain Lion

I don't understand what you're saying here. Do you mean that HP specifically disabled EFI booting to Mountain Lion? Seems unlikely. Or do you mean that USB booting is disabled in the EFI BIOS? When I hit F9 to get the boot menu at boot time, whether or not there's a bootable USB stick in a USB port, it doesn't list any UEFI devices to boot from besides the hard drives. The only legacy device it lists is the DVD drive.

in which case the best way to install is via the iBoot 3.3.0 DVD (with a Mountain Lion DVD) OR via a USB hard disk drive which has the 10.8 OSX Installer installed onto it using xMove (check Tonymac Other Archives for this program). I've tried the iBoot DVD on HP laptops before with the Snow Leopard DVD and they work, so I assume it should work with yours too...

I tried using the xMove instructions and I think I probably screwed up my working installation. We'll see. Sigh.

 

[Middleman]

I don't understand what you're saying here. Do you mean that HP specifically disabled EFI booting to Mountain Lion? Seems unlikely. Or do you mean that USB booting is disabled in the EFI BIOS? When I hit F9 to get the boot menu at boot time, whether or not there's a bootable USB stick in a USB port, it doesn't list any UEFI devices to boot from besides the hard drives. The only legacy device it lists is the DVD drive.

That's EXACTLY what I mean (that HP has EFI booting disabled)...for Hackintosh has to be an EFI-compatible BIOS for it to work generally. I suspect it is because it is a Legacy BIOS it is using that's why you're having problems seeing the Unibeast USB stick. Either that or it's something to do with Legacy USB setting having an effect? Which I somehow doubt....

The other thing you could try is creating an iBoot DVD. iBoot should work with a Snow Leopard/Lion DVD on the HP in most cases...

 

[nobodynose]

That's EXACTLY what I mean (that HP has EFI booting disabled)...for Hackintosh has to be an EFI-compatible BIOS for it to work generally. I suspect it is because it is a Legacy BIOS it is using that's why you're having problems seeing the Unibeast USB stick. Either that or it's something to do with Legacy USB setting having an effect? Which I somehow doubt....

I was just reading some information about the Z210 workstation, and HP is making a big deal about the fact that the Z series workstations are their first ones with UEFI BIOS. And I can't find any Legacy USB setting. However, I just did a dump of the BIOS settings (using a tool HP provides) and I see one that I don't recall seeing when I was going through all the BIOS settings before. It's called "Lock Legacy Resources" and is set to "Enable". I suspect that might be the problem - I'm going to try toggling that setting and see what happens.

Follow-up: Changing that "Lock Legacy Resources" setting made absolutely no difference, it still didn't see the USB thumb drive. I'm officially giving up on this experiment.

The other thing you could try is creating an iBoot DVD. iBoot should work with a Snow Leopard/Lion DVD on the HP in most cases...

I have access to neither a Snow Leopard nor a Lion DVD, and I'm not interested in buying a Snow Leopard DVD as this is just an experiment anyway. Or is there some way to make a Mountain Lion DVD (to use with iBoot) from the InstallESD.dmg?

 

[mikeasage]

I have a Z210 as well and ran into issues trying to get Ubuntu to boot from a USB drive. The USB drive didn't show up until I did the following - some of this may not be necessary, but these are some current bios settings and it's seeing the USB drive in the boot menu and booting from it:


Storage -> Storage Options -> Removable Media Boot = Enabled
Storage -> Boot Order -> USB Floppy / CD is first - then USB Hard Drive (I doubt if this was somehow required, but it's what I have)
Security -> USB Security -> I have all the USB ports set to enabled
Security -> Master Boot Record Security = Disabled
Advanced -> UEFI Option Rom = Disabled

I'm not quite sure if I have the path correct for that last one, but it's close.

Best of luck
Mike

 

[nobodynose]

Thanks! I'll give this a try. I tried asking about this with HP Technical Support and in HP's User Support Forums and got nothing useful out of either.

 

[nobodynose]

I have a Z210 as well and ran into issues trying to get Ubuntu to boot from a USB drive. The USB drive didn't show up until I did the following - some of this may not be necessary, but these are some current bios settings and it's seeing the USB drive in the boot menu and booting from it:


Storage -> Storage Options -> Removable Media Boot = Enabled
Storage -> Boot Order -> USB Floppy / CD is first - then USB Hard Drive (I doubt if this was somehow required, but it's what I have)
Security -> USB Security -> I have all the USB ports set to enabled
Security -> Master Boot Record Security = Disabled
Advanced -> UEFI Option Rom = Disabled

I'm not quite sure if I have the path correct for that last one, but it's close.

Best of luck
Mike

All my options were the same as yours except the last one, so I toggled it. Now the USB key does show up under "Legacy Devices", but it still doesn't seem to work. My goal, of course, is to try to install Mac OS X on this machine; as a test (since I don't have all the tools I need to make a UniBeast installer here) I tried making a Ubuntu installer USB. I tried with two different thumb drives and two different USB installer creation tools, but I can't get it to work. When I select the USB drive (under "Legacy Devices") from the boot menu, it hits the thumb drive briefly (the light flashes a couple of times), then boots into Windows. I'll bring a UniBeast installer from home tomorrow and give it a try; if that doesn't work I'm giving up.

 

[mikeasage]

I used the LiLi USB Creator to create my bootable USB drive downloadable from here:

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

There are some options available in it -

I picked my USB drive

I downloaded the Ubuntu 13.04 ISO as my source.

I set my persistence to 4090 MB (the max I could get).

I also selected all the step 4 check boxes

Then hit create. That worked for me.