I need help making my usb flash drive bootable for hp proliant dl380 g4

First, it's not booting from a CD or Hard Disk if you've reached that error. The 'last-ditch' effort to boot is to attempt a PXE boot from the network card, but your Ethernet cable isn't plugged in. Unless you know you've setup such a PXE boot server, you'll want to check the BIOS settings to be sure the CD-ROM is set to boot first, followed by the Hard Disc. Be sure you have Disc 1 of the Linux installation set in the CD-ROM Drive and reboot. If you don't get the install screen, you may have another issue (bad CD-ROM Drive, bad cable/controller, no power to CD-ROM, etc.)

Another note on the DL380, if there is a RAID controller, you'll need to setup the RAID before installing the OS. You'll want to make sure your hard drives are properly installed and aren't failed. The RAID configuration screen will verify the RAID status once it has been initialized, which will somewhat verify the drive status.

Do a ghost on the first hard drive install ghost on new hard drive and replace, I can provide more details on procedure just ask

I bought an HP DL380 G4 from here, and called them up any time I had a question like this. These guys were amazingly smart. Perhaps you can call them up and pretend to be a customer?

Internal Optical drive is having problem, use external dvd writer

Make sure the BIOS is fully updated from the HP website. Most DL3-series servers supported booting from an external USB cd, try F10 or F12 at boot in order to bring up a boot menu.

You don't actually install SmartStart. You boot from the SmartSmart CD and then based on the menu selections you make, it will configure RAID and install the appropriate drivers to prep the system for the OS of your choice. After this, it will initiate the installation of the OS.

Since your server is a G4, the CDs you have are probably very out of date. I would recommend downloading the latest SmartStart from hp.com before proceeding.

If you already have an OS on your DL380 and are trying to update the drivers you are looking for the Proliant Support Pack, not SmartStart. This can also be downloaded from hp.com - the exact directions for installation vary by OS but are included with the download.

This model was found not to be 64bit but 32bit.

do you use software/hardware raid?
hopefully hardware :-)
and is it mirrord or raid5?

Try to update the firmwares. Maybe the threeshould of the fans are incorrect. A new firmware can correct this problem.

Let me know if this post helps

Check on the HP website for BIOS updates and Firmware updates for your raid controller. This sounds very odd that there is a 28GB limitation on drive size? What size drives are in there now? They usually step up in size like 9GB, 18GB, 36GB, 72GB, etc.... Your IT guy maybe misinformed.