USB flash drive not showing up in Boot Menu

[rfear]

We recently purchsed some of the EliteDesk 800 G2s and are having a terrible time getting them to see certain usb flash drives to boot off them. I have some PNY Turbo 3.0 drives that boot fine. I needed more, so I got some Kingston DataTraveler 100s and they wouldn't boot. Did some research and saw others were having a terrible time using them with UEFI BIOSes, so we ordered up more PNY Turbo 3.0 drives and now these new ones aren't seen, just like the Kingstons. Try the "old" PNY's and they boot. 

I use RUFUS to make the bootable flash with an ISO of the HP restore disc. Did the same process on both and only the old one was listed in the Boot Menu. Has anyone else seen this? Does HP have a tool for these machines to make boot discs? They don't have optical drives so I can't run media creation software, which ironically, these come with the version that only writes to optical discs. Why would they not put the one that does USB media? Anyways, there has to be something out there that will help me make the USB drives show up and boot. This is beyond aggrivating.

[soccer_dan]

Rufus has lots of options that could conflict with BIOS settings

Create a bootable USB key by using Diskpart (https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/danstolts/2012/07/create-bootable-usb-thumb-drive-key-using-disk... - as an example, here)

diskpart
> list disk
> select disk ?
>  clean
> create partition primary
> select partition 1
>active
> format fs=ntfs quick label=”Win8-RP-x64”
> exit

Then mount your image iso file and copy (drag/drop works well) the contents to the flash drive

try it

BTW, look at the BIOS. If the systems came preloaded with WIndows 10 then, among other settings, UEFI native boot is the defaul (change it to UEFI with Compatibility mode), and SecureBoot is enabled (change to DIsabled)

[rfear]

Actually, these came with Windows 7 and then also have the 10 disc.

But, honestly, RUFUS isn't the issue, the BIOS/UEFI is. They aren't even showing up when ESC/F9 is hit. They can't even been selected. Other machines these boot just fine and install the OS. It's something with the BIOS that is causing this.

I have used diskpart and did what you suggested, and even tried FAT32 to no avail.

[soccer_dan]

Then, assuming you tried resetting the BIOS to default and still do not see the flash drive, it is possible a BIOS fix might be needed. YOu should open a support case with HP so they can possibly replicate the problem and work on a solution

[rfear]

Actually, before coming here, I did have a ticket setup with HP and they tried to send a tech out. I saw no point in that. I would have figured that would have been sent over to engineering and let them test things out with those kind of flash drives and fix it.