booting with usb flash drive

[bbiggs]

I have an Asus motherboard that allows various usb boot device settings including floppy, cd,zip, and hdd.The bios loads the usb ports but does not see the usb flash drive even though it supposedly is formated to boot?
Any suggestions or comments would be helpful
Thanks Bob :confused: This should be in PC's not notebooks

[bbiggs]

The bios will not allow changes in boot order so as to be able to boot from usb flash drive. Let me know if this is common. I thought by getting a newer style laptop and processor there would be more flexibility? :(

[bbiggs]

Following the instructions on site weetht.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick at the point in trf the bootsect.bin corrupts the flash drive and requires a reformat :( :confused:

[jlreich]

If booting from a USB device is not supported in the BIOS, you are out of luck.

Is the laptop a cheaper one that perhaps actually uses an older mobo? This happens a lot with cheaper models.

Most newer mobo's (last couple of years) do support booting from USB, but booting from a USB is still problematic at best. There are no standards setup for it yet, so even when both hardware and software support it you still need to stand on your head and a wave voodoo doll around even to get a chance for it to work right. :p

[ErnieK]

I also have an Asus (A8N-E) board and when I was mucking about trying to get it to boot from a USB drive I had set the first boot device as removable (If I remember correctly) After doing this it booted from USB without problems

[mjc]

There is no need to start so many threads about the same topic...

All the topics of these threads are dealing with booting from a USB flash drive. Are you trying to do this with one or two diffeerent machines?

Like has been said, the BIOS must explicitly support this option.

[ErnieK]

Also good clear instruction for making a USB bootable device here
http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

[hiredgoonz]

Make sure any Fast Boot settings are disabled and have the drive plugged in when you set the options in the BIOS, some options only appear when teh USB device is attached...

[Paul Komski]

Ernie - Your bootdisk link shows "There are several ways folks are getting their USB CDroms, Hard Drives, and other drives to work in DOS". In other words one would boot to DOS (on a boot floppy or CD or a HDD partition) and then use the suggested methods to access a USB device. That is not the same as booting to a USB device, per se, with an operating system installed onto it unless I missed something at bootdisk.com. What specific drive did you successfully boot to on your Asus board and did you install DOS or Linux or something else onto it.

[ErnieK]

Paul
I used a 512MB pen drive and I appoligise as I posted the wrong link. Below is the correct link with instructions

Information
http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-01-23.htm#1

Instructions
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177102101

[bbiggs]

I have desk top and a laptop and I was interested in the ability to boot either one with the usb removable drive. The laptop does not appear to give the option for usb boot even though it's brand new HP 5000 series.?? The desk top MB is an Asus a7n8x-x with following options inthe boot sequences . positions 1,2 and 3 floppy, ls120, zip, hd0, cd, hd1,2,3 usb floppy,zip,cd,hd1,2,3. I have been unable make the usb flash drive bootable yet but an external 80 gig maxtor attached via usb starts to bring us win xp and then reboots. I have unpluggged all internal drives except cd and floppy and set the usbhd in 1st postion and booted with a win98 and me floppy. FDISK JUST RETURNS "A" prompt. Any suggestions.

[Paul Komski]

Even when BIOSes such as yours purport to support booting USB HDDs it can still be a very problematic area. I had such settings on a previous Biostar board and similar ones, like Ernie, on an Asus A8N-E. On both of them booting USB floppies and CDs was not problematic but a wide range of USB FlashDrives as well as IDE drives in an enclosure was always problematic. Sometimes Fdisk would see them and sometimes not. Even when Fdisk could see a drive and mark a partition as active so that one could format the drive and sys it, the drive would then apparently successfully boot to a C: prompt on the drive in the enclosure but that was that. Firstly I found that other FAT partitions on the sysem were not read properly or the system would simply freeze at some point. I even got as far as copying the Win98 files to the external drive and then running setup. Thought I was in business but half way through the installation and after a successful first reboot the system froze again. It seems that even when you can get an OS to start from an external it cant then necessarily properly communicate with most of the hardware in order to function properly.

DOS or Linux would be the most likely to be successful because they are not plug and play OSes, which leaves just one thing for you to try and that is to set any BIOS settings for plug and play OS to no/off: the BIOS will then only "play around" with the boot settings but will not affect how the rest of the hardware is polled by the OS.

I'm sure someone, somewhere will find a combo of drive and mobo that will work properly and I am waiting to hear of it so that I can try it out. The concept of running a Bart version of WinPE would seem from Ernie's links to have the greatest chance of success - but even if one gets such a drive setup one needs to remember that it will not work universally across all motherboards.

Also plug n play OSes like Windows are always going to be more problematic since issues like repolling the hardware and reactivating on each new PC will persist.

[mjc]

Part of the problem with booting Windows from a USB device, is that when USB drivers are loaded in Windows (or a new device is added to the bus), it resets the USB bus!

Think very carefully about that statement a second...

[bbiggs]

Hi Paul
Thanks for the response.
I have been messing with the settings since I sent the last email.
I formatted the usb flash drive and then used "HP Key Utility which allowed me to produce a bootable removable drive. It had option to create it as a HD mapping to C. I thought that might just mess things up so I opted to make it a floppy configuration.
I had to set the bios to use "usb zip" in first position and it worked. Caveat is that it would not see ntfs drive properly using win98 so I tried win ME and had success. But you are correct that having an USB external HD present caused the fdisk not function. Unplugging re-booting seemed to work.

:) bbiggs

[Paul Komski]

Well I think that what you have done is to have enabled booting to a floppy/zip configuration/emulation - presumably to an A:\ prompt. It has often been suggested that attempting to boot to a flash drive using USB-Zip as the boot option in the BIOS is one of the best chances of getting such drives to boot. The thing I would love to see done successfully is the capability of booting to such drives as if they had hard drive partitions or indeed to boot to an external IDE drive in an external enclosure.

[jlreich]

The thing I would love to see done successfully is the capability of booting to such drives as if they had hard drive partitions or indeed to boot to an external IDE drive in an external enclosure.
Yeah that would be the holy grail of USB booting. To actually run a full fledged OS from an USB drive. Just by choosing to do so like any internal drive.

Actually I was thinking. With SATA ports abounding these days the need to figure out USB booting is becoming less intriguing. SATA is hot swappable and already easy to boot from, and much faster than USB.

The only problem I see is the lack of small portable SATA drives. Micro drives are getting more affordable, but anything with moving parts is not ideal for portability. But I think what we need is flash drives with an SATA interface and we will be all set for ultimate portability. :cool:

Hmm...??

[mjc]

You mean one of these (http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/08/18/accelerated_compact_flash/)?

Addonics (http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adidecf.asp) has a bootable IDE reader and the CF-SATA reader....

[jlreich]

Yeah! That's what I am talking about! :cool: :cool:

I gotta have one of those. :D

[Paul Komski]

I can see the value of these CF adapters (notably to have an easily removeable operating system for that PC) but booting to them is not fundamentally different than booting to the IDE or SATA that they emulate. Transferring them to other desktops would have the same problems as transferring hard drives themselves and unfortunately they wont work (as far as I know) for booting-up a laptop.

As an aside does anyone know if booting to laptops from the PCMCIA interface is ever a possibility.

[ErnieK]

Paul
Is this what you are asking about? (it states for linux so don't know about Windows) I think the 5th paragraph down is what you are asking.
http://www.bbri.org/faculty/bohm/laptop_installation_notes.html

[jlreich]

Well you are of course right about the problems of taking the drive to another computer. But my point is that the problems associated with botting from USB are already solved with SATA, and all the benfits as are there as well. And it's faster. The only downside is power. But that can be easily accommodated as well.

All we are really lacking is mobo and laptop manufacturers giving us an external port. Or actually it's case manufacturers that need to give it to us since when it comes to desktops there are uaually already more than enough ports availble on the mobo. But if we really want we can run an SATA and power cable out of the case without much problem.

Sorry for stealing your thread bbiggs. :o

[Paul Komski]

"Is this what you are asking about? (it states for linux so don't know about Windows)."
I don't think so. As far as I can tell that is a network install of Linux done by booting to a floppy and then accessing the installation files via a NIC in the PCMCIA slot. Network installs of the NT OSes should also be possible in an analagous way assuming one could access the relevant server from the boot floppy.

"But my point is that the problems associated with botting from USB are already solved with SATA, and all the benfits as are there as well."
I take the points made, but the main benefits of being able to boot to a USB flash drive are (a) the small size and portability of the hardware and (b) the wide range of computers of all sorts nowadays, including laptops, that have a usb port.

An example. I am currently working on a FujitsuSiemens LifeBook C series (P3) Laptop with no functional CDROM. In order to clean reinstall Win2K onto the non booting HDD I had to first get the i386 folder onto the hard drive and the only 'easy' way to do this was disassemble the HDD and slave it to a Desktop with an 2.5"-IDE adapter. If there had been a way of booting to a USB drive (just DOS would have done fine) containing the i386 folder it would have been such a simple task. I had also tried and failed to boot to a floppy with USB/CDROM drivers and access an external USB CDROM in order to access the setup files that way.

A Bootable Sata Interface on such a setup would (as things stand) be a rarity to come across.

One thing that PEEPs may know is whether booting from a device in a PCMCIA slot is ever done. I would presume, but don't know, that this could function like a PCI HDD Controller Card on a Desktop and allowing the possibililty of booting to SCSI should the BIOS allow it.

[jlreich]

A Bootable Sata Interface on such a setup would (as things stand) be a rarity to come across.
Right, that's why I am saying we need this kind of thing to come about. The technology is already there, it's just a matter of implementing it. I don't think it would be very difficult to add an external SATA port and power adapter to a laptop. It looks like from the picture in the link the CF card is powered by the floppy power connector. Or make a PCMCIA card with everything needed, so you just plop in the CF card like any other card slot. And a version to you could plop in an empty 5 1/4" bay (or as part of the front panel on the case) with all the ports and adapters connected internally for desktops.

Hmm, if they would just make a thumb drive with the appropriate interface so you don't need an adapter...

Wouldn't be great if you could just stick in a thumb drive with whatever OS you wanted to boot without the need for a boot manager... Or worrying about hiding partitions etc.... And maybe have all your data drives hooked up internally...

Even with the adapters and cables we have now I think it is very possible to get it done. But I am more thinking to the future I guess.

Possibilities... :)

An example. I am currently working on a FujitsuSiemens LifeBook C series (P3) Laptop with no functional CD ROM. In order to clean reinstall Win2K onto the non booting HDD I had to first get the i386 folder onto the hard drive and the only 'easy' way to do this was disassemble the HDD and slave it to a Desktop with an 2.5"-IDE adapter. If there had been a way of booting to a USB drive (just DOS would have done fine) containing the i386 folder it would have been such a simple task. I had also tried and failed to boot to a floppy with USB/CDROM drivers and access an external USB CDROM in order to access the setup files that way.
I had this same problem with my old Dell (P3 as well), the modular bay went bad. But I was lucky in that it had a floppy drive that attached via an external connector.

Did you try the win2K floppy disks? I used the XP floppy disks which gave me USB support and was able to get XP installed through a CD-ROM connected by an IDE to USB connector. It was slow since the the USB is 1.1, but it worked. :)

[Paul Komski]

Did you try the win2K floppy disks? I used the XP floppy disks which gave me USB support
I have never tried installing either Win2K or WinXP using the sets of installation floppies. At what stage were you able to get USB support and access the CDROM - and from what sort of interface or GUI? Interesting approach I had never thought about trying.

[pop pop]

I'm late to this thread, but I recall the following article on this subject looked pretty good and from a normally good source:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_your_pocket/index.html

[jlreich]

I have never tried installing either Win2K or WinXP using the sets of installation floppies. At what stage were you able to get USB support and access the CDROM - and from what sort of interface or GUI? Interesting approach I had never thought about trying.
The floppy disks run the exact same setup the CD does. Once the setup was up and running I proceeded as normal with the XP CD in the drive connected by USB. Everything worked just like I had the CD in an internal IDE CD-ROM drive.

Actually I had bought the IDE to USB adapter in order to hookup the laptop HDD to another system and copy the setup files like you did, but the stupid dell HDD wasn't a standard size 2.5" IDE connector and wouldn't fit in the adapter. It was smaller than the standard 2.5" HDD connector on the adapter :mad:

So a little pissed off and wondering how I would get XP installed it occurred to me that I saw USB drivers loading during the initial loading of XP setup. So I tried it and it worked. :)

One thing to note, the cd drive hooked up to the USB adapter had to be plugged in from the beginning for XP setup to recognize it. I think I forgot to plug it in the first time and it didn't work when I plugged it in after setup was going.

[Paul Komski]

Thanks pop pop for the link. Its possibly a bit rambling but the basics are all there. It led me to another quite good expanation of the vagaries of booting from USB at http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticleSrc.jhtml?articleID=177102101

To precis both articles.
1) Your BIOS must support booting to USB (and be using the correct emulation method). For mobos with older BIOS, trying a BIOS upgrade may well add USB support. (I must admint that I had never thought of ugrading to achieve this)!
2) The pen drive must be a compatible type and be correctly formatted (and the HP utility is the best for doing this formatting).
3) You will need to have the installation files for WinXP SP2 at your disposal.
4) Use a recent version of the BartPE builder to customise and install the Windows PreinstalledEnvironment onto the drive.
5) USB booting may be augmented by utilising ramdisk.sys and setupldr.bin FROM WIN2003 SERVER SP1 and thus enable booting to a RamDrive.

Note:-
Both articles hone-in on BartPE which creates a slimmed down version of your own WinXP as a live CD or bootable pendrive. It is not for the non-geekish and there is a learning curve in adding all the plug-ins and network/internet support to the media. Neither article embellishes how to boot to DOS or Linux on such media.

jlreich I am just going to have to try the floppy install to see how it pans out. I had been under the impression that going that route avoided the need for a CDROM at all - but that is obvioulsly mistaken. Do you get prompted to insert the install CD or is it found automatically by the floppy setup?

I wonder why your 2.5" adapter didnt work with the Dell drive. I have used an adapter successfully on at least two different Dell Laptop HDDs. Some of the smallest drives use a smaller voltage and there should be a warning to not attach them but (I think) that even these low voltage drives have the standard 44-pin attachment (leaving aside the usual 4-to-6 pin additional pins for jumpering these small drives). On many laptop HDDs you must first remove the male/female interface sitting on the pins before fitting it to the adapter.

[jlreich]

jlreich I am just going to have to try the floppy install to see how it pans out. I had been under the impression that going that route avoided the need for a CDROM at all - but that is obvioulsly mistaken. Do you get prompted to insert the install CD or is it found automatically by the floppy setup?
It was found automatically. I was never prompted for it at all.

The floppy setup only eliminates the need to boot from CD. Setup is exactly the same as when booting from the CD. It loads everything up to the point where you get the choice of installing XP or entering the recovery console. Basically it has everything on it that the CD has with the exception of the actual windows files.

You have me curious about the dell HDD. I will have to take it out and have another look at it again. It's been well over a year since I did it so I don't remember what it looked like exactly. All I really remember is standing there like a dumbfounded child trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. :eek: :p

[Paul Komski]

ErnieK - I found the correct bootdisk link by accident. It is http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

[ErnieK]

Paul
I was almost right. :rolleyes: :)

I have now saved the new address.