On Tue, 2023-10-03 at 23:28 -0600, Joe Zeff wrote: > I've downloaded and verified an .iso for F38 with Xfce, used dd to write > it to a new flash drive and tried to boot it on my laptop with a brand > new blank hard drive. All I get is a grub prompt. Has that laptop ever booted successfully from a USB-anything? Are there any BIOS/UEFI booting options you can play with? I've a PC that I can't boot from anything plugged into the USB port. It has boot options for a USB floppy or Zip drive, neither of which I have, which are sufficiently "special" that you can't just plug in a USB flashdrive and boot from a CD/DVD-ROM boot-image on it. For it, I always burnt a CD or DVD. Now, it's just too old and horrible to actually want to use that PC. On some other painful PC, I plugged a USB DVD-ROM drive into it and installed from a burnt disc. In the past, my other way to get an install onto a difficult system was to remove the hard drive, fit it in another PC, install Linux to it, put the hard drive back into the painful PC. I don't know how customised the install is, these days, for that to work. Other people have done things like download an install ISO to a spare partition on a drive, fiddled with the GRUB entries, and booted the installer from that hard drive and installing to other partitions on the same drive. There was a "media writer" app that helped you put an installer onto a USB memory stick, giving you different bootblock options. What I read about the current mediawriter app doesn't have any options like that. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.99.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Sep 13 14:19:20 UTC 2023 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue