Yup, see, just like I said, FAT boot par….hey!! What’s that other partition there!? Wait, is it silly? Let’s look at the USB drive in question in the Ubuntu 20.04 Disks utility: This was a bit silly though – the Dell Recover Tool completely formats the USB drive so it’s pristine and nothing is left on it but the FAT boot partition. One thing folks may not realize is the Flash Drive has to be formatted as FAT 32 in order to boot as UEFI. The next day I was researching more and some one mentioned something about an NTFS partition: After a couple hours, i walked away and slept on it. Maybe BIOS settings are tweaked? I reset BIOS back to defaults, still no option to boot. Ok, maybe it’s the brand of USB drive? I reflashed a different brand USB drive and it had the same problem. Ubuntu 20.04 server install drive? Yup, no problems. My Ubuntu 18.04 install drive? It showed up. However, no matter what I did, my USB drive never showed up under “UEFI BOOT” there. Now you should just need to reboot your laptop and press “F12” to get the one time boot prompt to go so you can specify the USB drive to boot off of (screen shot curtesy of ): Odly, the other steps are not clickable to find out more information, they’re just showing you’re on step two of five: Then you wait a while (10 min?) while the program runs it’s course and you see the final screen saying it’s done. Thanks Dell! If you’re not on a Dell then that center panel isn’t available, still works though! This is totally awesome and saves a TON of time. The magic happens here then: the software builds a USB bootable image for Windows 10 with all the drivers needed for your specific laptop. When you run that, you again punch in your Service Tag. First you go to their site and punch in your Dell Service Tag. They have this great tool called the Dell OS Recovery Tool. Dell, it turns out, makes it REALLY easy to do a clean re-install of Windows 10 on your XPS laptop. My buyer wanted to run the stock Windows 10 OS, so it was up to me to get it back to it’s roots to close the deal. Further, I put in a faster NVMe drive and replaced the battery with an OEM Dell one to give it a bit more running time (battery health in the BIOS showed as bad). Since then I’ve also upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 with zero hardware compatibility issues. In that post I just linked you can read about how I upgraded it to have a better wireless card. Remember that awesome Dell XPS 13 I got back in 2016? The one that came with Windows 10 but then I wiped clean with Ubuntu 16.04? Well, it’s still goin’ strong! So strong that it’s time to sell it to another happy user now that work got me an upgrade.
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January 2023
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