boot from a USB CDROM

lothario · 08-23-2006, 05:59 PM

I want to boot from a USB CDROM.

The motherboard has 2 USB ports but the BIOS does not have any USB boot options.
The only boot options are LAN, Floppy, Hard Disk 1 2 3 and 4

I tried Smart Boot Manager but it does not see the USB CDROM.

Is there any other way to boot from the USB CDROM?
Maybe using some kind of boot floppy?

Brian1 · 08-23-2006, 06:36 PM

Depending on the distro they may provide and img file like boot.img that you can create on a floppy to boot. But since these are much tighter configuration it may not support usb access.

Brian1

J.W. · 08-23-2006, 06:37 PM

If your BIOS does not support booting from USB, you're probably out of luck. Perhaps there is some kind of obscure trick to start the boot process from the floppy, then load some drivers, etc, but from a practical standpoint, it would probably be more trouble than it's worth. Alternatively, if you've got a spare hard drive laying around, have you considered just installing Linux to it, and dual booting? Just an idea