Does Windows 8 certification nuke USB for bootable Linux?
 

I recently ran into problems with my USB project. I wanted to find a USB flash device so I could make an easily portable and bootable USB Linux OS.

I bought, and eventually returned, several brands and varieties within a brand.

At boot time:

My bios only recognized 1 usb flash device (San Disk Glider 16 gb) but only recognized it as a fixed drive (i.e., it appeared under hard drives not removable drives). That is what I now use though it is not very convienent since it acts as a fixed instead of removable item.

After boot time (i.e., into Windows):

My computer recognized all USB devices and they worked fine for data storage but obviously not booting.

I researched the issue and learned many USB manufacturers changed things to meet Windows 8 certification.

Does this mean all USB flash devices will act like this: either behave as fixed disk at boot or not at all be detected at boot?

Are there any USB flash devices that still behave like removable, bootable devices?

As far as I am aware all current BIOS and the replacement UEFI tend to list USB drives as hard disk drives -- this isn't anything to do with the USB device. As for being able to boot from them: to do so you would need an image to boot from that Secure Boot recognises as signed and valid -- thankfully not something I have come across yet so I'm afraid the only help I can give you is to suggest you google how to boot Linus from USB with Secure Boot as I'm sure others have tried and, hopefully, succeeded.

Can't you hit F12 or something during boot to get access to a boot list; USB, CDROM, etc, where you should be able to select a bootable USB device. Nope! I don't know much about UEFI boot firmware either. :(

Play Bonny!

:hattip:

Having had this issue with a colleagues laptop I can say with certainty that this won't work. What 273 said about Secure Boot is pretty much it. Unless you can trick the motherboard into recognising a hard drive as been signed for it, you're not going to be able to boot from that hard drive. I have no idea what the plan would be if a hard drive fails as it seems there is no generic way to recover from that situation in Windows 8. (short of buying a new PC)

I would expect Windows 8 will allow a bootable recovary disk to be made but I haven't looked into it.
The PC should also allow you to disable Secure Boot if it is Windows 8 certified.

If I'm not mistaken, an EfI partition will have to be created on the usb with the efi boot files for the linux distro installed in order to boot, if the computer is in efi mode.

That is partly true, but some, if not all, Windows 8 machines require the operating system to initialise the usb ports. This is done to save boot-up time.

On these machines, not even a usb hid keyboard or mouse will work until the operating system is loaded.

It might be possible to gerry-rig a 'boot-strap cd' to boot up a usb. But it would probably be easier to just boot a live cd in the first place. (though it would either need to be signed or you would need to disable efi)

The computer / motherboard in question is nearly 5 years old. I don't recall having this problem in the past.

So, does this mean that from now on, any USB I buy will be recognized as a fixed disk?

Thank you for all the replies.

Unfortunately, I can't press F12 or any other such key. The only time I can access (or change) the boot order is to actually go into BIOS during boot.

Yes, as far as I canm tell all modern BIOS and UEFI systems will show a USB drive as a "fixed disk".
To boot from USB going into BIOS is excatly what you should do -- as has been the norm for the past 15 years or so.

Most modern computers show boot options with f8 key. As far as signed certified distro's fedora & ubuntu are 2 of them that come to mind & should also boot in efi-mode. Try googling starting usb/cd in usb mode. It maybe a kernel parameter.

OK - so now I know that this is unavoidable. Now, the 2nd part: why would my BIOS, in its listing of bootable devices, only show 1 of the multiple USB devices I tried?

In other words, I tested several different USB flash devices. All stored data during regular computer operation but only 1 was actually "bootable". Needless to say, that " bootable" 1 is the 1 I referenced earlier. It appears as a fixed disk in BIOS. The USB flash devices don't even appear in BIOS.

Are you not seeing the usb as a regular "Fixed Hdd"? If you are seeing it as a hdd then select it for boot.

Were the other flash drives larger than 16Gb? If so, that might be the problem. Some computers have trouble booting flash drives that have a large amount of storage on them.

The only USB flash I see in BIOS is one that is listed under "hard drives" instead of "USB devices". That is the one I use. It is 16 GB.

The other USB flash devices I tried were either 8 GB or 16 GB. BIOS did not even show them when I checked BIOS. However, after booting into my OS (Win7), I could see and use them. Thus, it appears these other USB flash devices can store data but not boot.

On the other hand, the 1 USB flash that BIOS did recognize can both store data and boot.

So strange. Why would one both store data and boot while the others would only store data?