Check out the Option Settings under the "Boot Sequence"
section. It refers to "USB Device" as a "memory device",
not a "storage device". And when I explicitly asked Dell's
Tech Support whether that would include USB hard drives,
the answer was "No". Would someone here tell why the
Dell PCs can boot from USB flash drives and not from
USB hard drives?
*TimDaniels*
Could it be that the drive has to be formatted as a "super floppy", ie
no partition table, just a boot sector?
Try Fdisk-ing and reformating your flash drive. I suspect it will fail
to boot after you do this.
- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
Probably. Apart from that, USB disk and USB flash uses the
same command set, i.e. if one is bootable, then so is the other.
Arno
On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:24:07 -0800, "Timothy Daniels"
The only way I manually was able to get a USB flash drive to become bootable
w/o using a utility was to partition/format it as a FAT16 partition and then
sys the flash drive being sure to include msdos.sys.
Worked like a charm.
I have not make extreme attempts to make an external HDD bootable, but would
like to do so if I had the time.....
Stew
Also, there are at least three classes of USB storage device,
and the BIOS probably only implements some of them (floppy most common).
"Timothy Daniels" <SpamB...@NoSpamPlease.biz> wrote in message
news:47a22e39$0$8634$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
What does it mean to "sys the flash drive"?
*TimDaniels*
The sys dos command puts the basic dos boot files on the drive.
Yep. And the way I did it was kind of clumsy. I actually had to disable all
other bootable drives/network in BIOS, then boot to a modified Win95 floppy.
Under those conditions, the system recognized the flash drive volume (256mb)
just as it would a fixed drive. FDISK, format, sys.
Not positive, but I believe I then re-enabled all the other drives in BIOS,
but could still choose to F12 and boot from the flash drive. (Dimension
8300)
Beside the other reasons I gave for USB boot being difficult,
the CHS geometry in the MBR and boot sector have to match those of the BIOS,
which is not likely on most USB flash devices I've looked at.
"Timothy Daniels" <SpamB...@NoSpamPlease.biz> wrote in message
news:47a2b39b$0$17340$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
Could you please explain further why Canadian flash devices are unlikely to
have a cheese geometry in their moobers which match those in their
biospheres? And I have a nice pair of Canadian boots which aren't in the
least bit difficult.
I give up! This thread has evolved (drifted?) completely beyond my ken.
A shame, I hear Ken knows a thing or two about cheese geometries.
How much easier can it get when the SYS command takes care of all that.
> Assuming there is no MBR,
In which case you create one using Fdisk, (which you already
happen to have if you have access to the SYS command).
> or the MBR was created with fdisk.
In which case you just Format and SYS.
<belatedly> Ouch!