Booting from USB on HP ProLiant Microserver

I recently took the plunge and bought an HP ProLiant Microserver.  It’s sold with no operating system or CD/DVD drive, so after picking a solid OS (Ubuntu Server 10.10 64 bit) I set about playing about with installing it without buying a CD/DVD drive.  Call me cheap but I’d only use it once and never use again.  Besides, booting from CD/DVD is a bit last century isn’t it?  I found I had some issues with actually booting from USB, so here are the important settings.

In the Advanced tab, the USB Mass Storage Device Configuration setting should be set to Auto, or Hard Disk – but it can’t be the obvious CD-ROM option… it’s odd, but I couldn’t get this to work.

Next, in the Boot tab, the Removable Drives setting should be modified so that our bootable Ubuntu USB drive is the first drive in the list.  This tells the BIOS that we want our specific USB drive to be the primary removable drive and is important if you have more than one removable drive attached to the many USB ports on the microserver!

Last, in the Boot tab, the Boot device priority setting should be modified so that the bootable Ubuntu USB drive (selected as the primary removable drive) is the first priority.

Save the settings and reboot – the server now boots into the Ubuntu installer!  Now as I discovered, this causes problems in the Ubuntu installation with the message:

No Common CD-ROM drive was detected

This I discuss in my next post.