# Can't boot off the USB image



## rocwhite (Feb 18, 2010)

My computers (Dell SX280 PCs or Dell D600 laptop) seem to refuse to boot off the USB disk with non-Windows images written to it (I have also tried OpenSolaris images). I've tried using dd to write the .img files, or using unetbootin to write either .img or .iso images, or using UltraISO to write the iso files to my USB disk, but all the methods failed. But if the image was a Windows boot disk, it did work. Does anyone know what the problem could be? Is it simply because the computers are old enough? Or do I have to do anything special for the FreeBSD images to make the computers boot off a USB device? Thank you very much!


----------



## Speedy (Feb 18, 2010)

Can they boot from CD.


----------



## rocwhite (Feb 18, 2010)

NO. The DELL sx280 PCs have no CD-ROM, and that's why I want to use the flash drive...


----------



## Speedy (Feb 18, 2010)

Do they have TPM activated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module


----------



## rocwhite (Feb 18, 2010)

The problem is solved. I realized that I didn't clean the the flash drive correctly. And after I first cleaned the flash drive: `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1k count=1`, then wrote the image to it, it finally worked.

Sorry if I raised a possibly repeated question!


----------

