USB Booting Questions

Sledgehammer84 · Jan 10, 2008

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?

Nodsu · Jan 10, 2008

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?

Sledgehammer84 · Jan 14, 2008

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?

DelJo63 · Jan 14, 2008

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

mscrx · Jan 14, 2008

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

Sledgehammer84 · Jan 14, 2008

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

Nodsu · Jan 15, 2008

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?

mscrx · Jan 15, 2008

Nodsu said:
Much better to boot directly from USB.

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

USB Booting Questions

Sledgehammer84

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Nodsu

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Sledgehammer84

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DelJo63

mscrx

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Sledgehammer84

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Nodsu

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mscrx

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