Install from USB

I’m trying to install on a NUC device. I have tried multiple ISO to USB tools (Rufus, Etcher, Win32 Disk Imager, ISO to USB) and multiple USB drives and every one of them boots directly to the grub command line instead of the installer. I’ve tried launching the efi file directly through UEFI shell, disabling secure boot, and i just end up in the same place. I can’t boot in legacy mode as the NUC BIOS does not have support for it and I can’t roll back to an older version. I’ve tried multiple versions of UCS 3.8, 4.0, 4.2, and 4.3 and each of them exhibits the same behavior. Can someone please help me or tell me what I’m doing wrong?

It may be not the advice you need, but when may first 2 attempts to boot from USB I am going to burn a DVD, grab my cheap USB-SlimDVD and try to boot from there. I know, its a workaround but unless I want to learn “How to USB boot” it saves a lot of time.

As there is another report in Installation NUC mit UEFI claiming that also Booting from DVD fails I had quick look at the Intel pages.
In general Intel is not Linux as as supported (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005628/mini-pcs.html), when asked in the Intel forum they are trying to hand over to the Linux vendors (see https://communities.intel.com/thread/129243).
There are some models listed that should work at least with Ubuntu (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005499/mini-pcs.html).
Finally the document https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000022600/mini-pcs.html claims that only 2 Options need to be set to install Ubuntu: AHCI for Chipset SATA-Mode and Legacy Boot. For OpenElec it is addionally required to disable UEFI-boot.
Looking at this document I’d expect that these options are still available. If not I’d ask the the vendor either to provide updated information or to provide a firmware that matches to the specs at least if I had one of these models.

Thank you for the help and thorough research. I think it really just comes down to my needing to boot in legacy mode. Sadly the BIOS doesn’t support Legacy boot options, so I may need to find another distro. Either way, i greatly appreciate the help.

I have just completed an installation on a NUC. Initially I ran into the exact same issue but managed to get it to work.
This is what I did

  1. Use Rufus to create a USB bootable drive from the ISO file.
  2. Press F10 during the the NUC boot up to access the bios boot menu
  3. Select the USB drive as boot drive (! The drived appeared in the menu as a USB drive and also as two UEFI drives, only the USB entry worked)

Good luck.

Mastodon