Hello,

I am trying to make a bootable device for Acronis image restoration. I want to use a usb device. Is there any difference in booting functions for a USB FLASH DRIVE, USB HDD, or USB CD-ROM?

This will be used to restore 40 computers with the same image. These stations do not have an internal cd-rom or floppy drive. Acronis can build bootable cds and i already have one. is there any special formating required to use a flash drive or hdd via usb to load the restoration utilty?

CD-ROM booting is radically different from booting floppies, network or hard drives. There is no way you can convert a bootable CD to something that boots off something else. Well, unless the CD actually contains a single floppy image and nothing else..

Why not simply get a USB CD-ROM drive and use that to boot?

Seems that usb cd-rom booting is not supported on these machines. I am thinking of using a floppy to enable usb support then run the program on usb-cdrom. Any suggestions for the floppy?

Booting from USB devices depends upon USB mass storage support in the BIOS.

first of all it depends on the bios as jobeard said.
you can make a usb flash drive bootable with some tools and then copy all files you need for the imaging on it.

go here: http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php
and look at "Step 3: Copy the bootsectors to the ThumbDrive".

there are alot of other tools around to accomplish that....

e.g. the hp tool

Thanks will try! This bios doesnt look to promising for booting from usb.

Yes, you can make a DOS floppy that loads the driver for USB storage or CD-ROM and continue from there, but that's way too fiddly. Much better to boot directly from USB.

If the computers in question are similar, maybe you can find a BIOS update that adds USB booting support?

with the hp tool you can make the usb flash drive bootable...