Booting my laptop from an external USB optical drive

[s_mad010]

hi

i own a dell insprion 8200 and am looking for an option to boot from USB.

'external device' is the option i have seen on my friend's BIOS' and we selected this and were able to restore his laptop using his restore CD via an external potical drive.

the boot order options my laptop has are as follows:

CD/DVD/CD-rw Drive
Diskette Drive
Internal HDD
APR NIC
Modular Bay HDD
Cardbus NIC
Onboard NIC

these options haven't changed since i recently updated the BIOS through Dell's online support page.

Any ideas whether dell laptops are able to achieve this or which boot device it is?

In case anyone was wondering my fixed optical drive gets terribly hot, and i'd like to restore my laptop using the recovery CD. I have also emailed dell but no response as of yet.

best

shagun

P.S i've heard the overheating/fan problem is a reknowned issue with the Dell inspiron 8200 range...it gets to the point that after an hour of DVD playback the thing gets so hot that the movie starts to stutter =s

[Paul Komski]

If there are no USB boot options in the BIOS setup I doubt if you will be able to use the external USB-Optical for your purposes directly from the BIOS boot order. You could of course just try and see what happens.

You could try using BootIt-NG bootmanager from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/, configure it for USB 2.0 support and see if you can select the external optical from its menu. Its a bit geekish to use and no guarantees; you would also need to have a FAT partition or some unallocated space available on the HDD.

Possibly the internal optical is always going to confuse issues. If Dell provides a CD with an OEM OS on it rather than a restoration image to use then there are other options to try.