Lord Chaos

I got a Buffalo Turbo USB HDD, which is very nice and fast, not to mention it is supported without needing drivers.

We have a lot of machines on our site, and I would like to use this drive as a recovery/image/utility drive to just plug into the USB ports of the machines, then boot on it. (instead of running around with a whole bunch of floppy disks and CD's)

I have been searching on the net and I can't seem to find any definitive information about how to make it a bootable partition or maybe even putting on a boot menu to be able to boot more than 1 OS?

johnhook

Lord Chaos,

Check out this site:

http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

- John

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Lord Chaos

I read that guide and there's three problems, 1. Its for USB flash drives, not USB Harddrives 2. It requires FAT/FAT16 which really can't be used for very large Harddrives (mine is running NTFS) 3. The utilities/options it suggest aren't in Vista (like using format to make bootable)

:(

johnhook

Lord Chaos,

Sorry about that.

The BIOS must have an option to Boot from USB Hard Drive.

In reality only MS-DOS and Linux are suitable candidates for USB Booting.

- John

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Lord Chaos

The bios should have options for that.

And I would really be fine with DOS/Linux booting on it (and maybe a BartPE??), since most of our tools are DOS or Linux based anyway (or XP based).

But right now I am on a vista machine so I was wondering how to go about making it bootable.

But I guess I might have to go to the Linux forums or something...or which do I use if I want to make multiple boots with it?

johnhook

Lord Chaos,

How old is your PC/Motherboard? What is the make/model of your PC/motherboard?

Most new PC BIOS have the ability to boot from a USB drive. When you turn ON your PC, press the key to enter SETUP - poke around through those settings (be careful not to change anything you don't understand as this can cause bad things to happen). If your BIOS supports this, you should see an option in there to select a USB drive in your boot menu.

Knowing your PC / BIOS version - I could look it up and tell you exactly where to go in the SETUP - provided this is an option on your PC.

Here's a step-by-step guide for booting from a USB drive - I believe it's for Ubuntu Linux.

http://www.aselabs.com/articles.php?id=243

- John

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Lord Chaos

Its brandnew, its an EVGA i780 motherboard. The problem isn't just booting on this machine, but many others. But I know it should boot on some of them, which makes it worth making it bootable, for the rest of them I would guess its doable to make a bootable floopy that will get you to the USB drive?

The problem with your guide is that its again for USB Flash disks, not USB harddrives. I will try and see if it works with NTFS (It says it needs FAT16, which is no good, unless maybe its to make a small bootable partition that will boot to other partitions maybe?

johnhook

Lord Chaos,

I know that Linux and DOS can both be installed on an external USB hard drive. If the BIOS doesn't support booting from a USB device, it's true that you may have to create a bootable CD/DVD or diskette that points to the external USB drive.

NTFS is problematic on external drives because NTFS is not a friendly filesystem with any type of removeable media. There are ways around this - but this is essentially why those external USB hard drives and flash drives are all formatted as FAT or FAT32.

There are lots of folks out there who have come up with workarounds to the USB Hard Drive boot issue as it relates to non-USB bootable BIOS, formatting these drives as NTFS and even installing Windows XP on them.


XP on a USB Drive:

http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

There are also lots of 3rd party utilities out there which allow booting of various OS's from external USB hard drives.

Again - what you're attempting to do IS "do-able" - just not necessarily a Microsoft sanctioned/supported solution.

- John

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