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osxster

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 7, 2012
59
53
Question,

Does anyone know how to boot from a USB drive on the xServe? I have upgraded my xServe and I am using a AMD RX 590 video card. I removed the original Video Card as I couldn't get the server to work with both. However when you do this, the standard Apple Boot screen never comes up and you never get any video until the OS loads the video drivers, well after the machine has been on for a while. The problem is I cannot find a way to boot from a USB drive without unplugging my SSD. I want to experiment using ESXi on a USB stick, but I haven't figure out a way to use the Front Panel to get it to boot form the USB drive and I can't seem to find a way holding down Option on a Mac keyboard to get the USB drive to boot from the stardard boot screen. Holding down Option during startup prevents the box from booting, but hitting Right Arrow once and hitting enter on the keyboard still doesn't seem to trick the system into booting from the USB drive.

The USB drive also doesn't show up as a 'Startup Disk' in Catalina and I cannot figure out a way to add it there, hoping I could trick EFI to have it boot from the USB drive on next reboot.

My USB stick DOES boot and ESXi 6.5 does work with the original video card in the drive when I hold Option Down on machine startup and select the second partition. When I fake it out holding the Option Key, waiting, hitting the right arrow and Enter with no Apple Video Card installed and my AMD one, I get no booting at all. I never see the lights on the USB flash turn on, so I know it isn't booting. It seems like holding the Option Key down does something, but it doesn't seem like the boot menu comes up as the keyboard appears to be locked after that. Anyone have an ideas and I am opened to anything at this point. Thanks!


Thanks.

osxster
 
Install OpenCore bootloader to get a bootscreen.

Otherwise the front panel does have a very primitive boot selection method but it’s quite painful in my mind to use and is very limited in function.
 
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