On Wed, Oct 4, 2023 at 5:21 AM Tim via users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
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.

Check the vendor's site and web for reports of problems booting USB 
devices on your model.   There may be a BIOS update.   I think some
boot issues on older systems are due to code that doesn't support
current USB capacities and filesystems.

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/make-an-exfat-bootable-usb-flash-drive/
assumes you have access to Windows and has:

"Caveats: Legacy BIOS booting does not work on a very small select few finicky CSM booted systems."
 
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.

The rescue kernel has the drivers that were on the install image,
so should boot even if the installed kernel is missing some drivers.


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.
 
--
George N. White III