Boot from Usb Key

[Bruce Cowper]

All,

You are correct. There are a number of USB keys that use a 'floppy 
emulation' and report to the BIOS that they are floppy drives. Often the 
devices that support this require to be formatted as such, which can affect 
capacity. The problem tends to be support for bootable USB devices in 
general, where some motherboards say they will boot from USB keys etc, but 
in practice the standards vary so much that they only support a small range 
of devices.

I have a number of customers that use USB keys for booting other operating 
systems successfully, but thay all had issues with finding combinations of 
motherboards, BIOS versions and USB keys that actually worked. One example 
of a device a customer is sucessfully using is the SOYO Cig at r USB flash 
storage device http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=240.

Thanks

Bruce


-----Original Message-----
From: Henry Spencer <henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org>
To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 17:13:16 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Boot from Usb Key

> On 22 Sep 2004, Tim Writer wrote:
> > I have found that a _lot_ of systems (even some very new ones) won't
> boot
> > from USB, even if the BIOS has such an option.  In addition, some
> boards will
> > boot other USB devices (floppy, CD-ROM, etc.) but not a key.  This
> seems to
> > be a geometry issue which can sometimes be worked around by
> installing
> > another mbr...
> 
> The story I hear -- haven't experimented myself -- is that the BIOS,
> the
> MBR, and the filesystem itself all have to mesh perfectly for it to
> work. 
> Not enough attention was paid to standardizing the details, and the
> result
> is a mess, where the probability of everything cooperating properly
> without expert attention is quite low. 
> 
>                                                           Henry Spencer
>                                                       
> henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org
> 
> --
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