Junos OS

I am trying to help a friend who has a EX2300 switch that I was trying to update and configure to install for him.  I was able to update to 23.4R2 and j-web 23.4A1 all seemed well.  I took it into the office and fired it up and after about 5 minutes the alarm message came on and I couldn't ping the ip address that I had set for the switch so I hooked up to the console and I got no response.  I rebooted the switch, was able to get a response and watch it start to boot but it would just hang at a certain point and then the alarm light would come on again.  I then tried to the access the boot menu on the next reboot but it came up with the "can't load kernel" error.

I searched and found this KB33842 and I have tried to follow the steps but I have not had any success.  I have downloaded the USB install media for a number of different versions (including SR and I have tried to create the bootable USB with balena, rufus, winimage32 and dd on multiple 4 and 8 Gb usb drives and none of them were able to read by the switch  as per the directions in the KB.   Not one of the attempts showed the list of partitions of disk1s1 and disk1s1a, only ever disk1s1 so I was never able to manually boot from the USB to re-flash the switch.

Is there a special trick to creating the USB or is the switch now a doorstop?

Cheers

This is the procedure that we've used to recover non-bootable ex switches in the past.  It does seem to be very similar to what you already tried, so might not help.

https://supportportal.juniper.net/s/article/EX-How-to-format-install-EX2300s-and-EX3400s-via-USB?language=en_US

I am trying to help a friend who has a EX2300 switch that I was trying to update and configure to install for him.  I was able to update to 23.4R2 and j-web 23.4A1 all seemed well.  I took it into the office and fired it up and after about 5 minutes the alarm message came on and I couldn't ping the ip address that I had set for the switch so I hooked up to the console and I got no response.  I rebooted the switch, was able to get a response and watch it start to boot but it would just hang at a certain point and then the alarm light would come on again.  I then tried to the access the boot menu on the next reboot but it came up with the "can't load kernel" error.

I searched and found this KB33842 and I have tried to follow the steps but I have not had any success.  I have downloaded the USB install media for a number of different versions (including SR and I have tried to create the bootable USB with balena, rufus, winimage32 and dd on multiple 4 and 8 Gb usb drives and none of them were able to read by the switch  as per the directions in the KB.   Not one of the attempts showed the list of partitions of disk1s1 and disk1s1a, only ever disk1s1 so I was never able to manually boot from the USB to re-flash the switch.

Is there a special trick to creating the USB or is the switch now a doorstop?

Cheers