I have a desktop, ten years old. I installed a USB 3.0 card, it works, but when booting up from a USB memory stick, it would not go and I had to plug it into my old built in USB 2.0 port. Then install went on and could try the live system...

How can I get my system and even the BIOS to detect and use the USB 3.0 at start up?

As far as I know you don't. The USB 3 driver gets loaded by the kernel (i.e. when it is too late for a live session). And I don't think you can get an USB 3 capable BIOS for your mainboard, at least I never heard of one.

Generally, if the USB port is on the motherboard the bios can use it to boot. If it is an add-in card like yours it does not get activated until the kernel loads. So, as stated above, you are out of luck in using that card to boot and are stuck with the built in ports for booting.

Will a USB stick like mine with 128 GB memory boot up with some OSs on a UEFI enabled computer?

Depends what you've got on it. You need an EFI system partition with a bootloader in .efi format just like on a hard drive. Most machines have a special key that you can press during boot to get a device menu and that should have the usb device on it.

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I'd like to see some documents or tutorials on doing this? Making a bootable flash drive.

Check your motherboard manual - it should explain how to get to the EFI boot menu that hazel describes. It's usually a function key (F2, F11, F12, something like that), otherwise go into the BIOS and select the flash drive - if your system supports UEFI (it may or may not at that age; the motherboard manual or the mfgr's website should also explain if it supports EFI booting) it should give two options for a bootable image found on a flash drive: UEFI and USB. So for example it may be like:

"UEFI - USB 8GB drive"
"USB - USB 8GB drive"

The 'USB' option is non-UEFI. If the system doesn't support UEFI it won't have EFI options available at boot (obviously), but you should still have a standard BIOS boot menu available (similar function key press), and can select a USB drive with a bootable image ('to create that' you need a bootable image and then to write it onto the drive with whatever tool you like - dd, brasero, Rufus, etc). This might have some more info for you: https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linu...-the-easy-way/ (note that 'Startup Disk Creator' is unique to Ubuntu, and I've never gotten it to read non-Canonical bootable images (admittedly I've never tried very hard either since dd and brasero also work just fine)).

I've never run into issues with capacity of USB drives being a problem for USB booting, but agree with add-in cards being essentially worthless for 'boot up' like that.

From post #1, your box is incapable. The reason is that the BIOS can't talk to the pcie bus before the kernel is loaded. So it doesn't see your card.

Mark this solved, close this thread, use your usb2 port and be glad you have it. What you can probably do is set 'root=' on your usb3 card & drive, as your kernel will be up then. You might even get going on your normal boot drive, with 'root=' pointing at the usb3 external drive.

I had that issue but for some reason a bios update allowed it to find and use usb3 add on card. Might move the card to new location.

What happens in bios when you power off, remove ac, press power button a few times, insert usb to add on card, return ac, power up to bios? In most cases the usb ought to show up as a hard drive order (not a usb device order)

Card may be limited by design.

SCSI and raid cards may show up as a slightly different thing in bios.

I had a laptop once where the usb ports on the left hand side could be used for booting, but the ones on the right hand side couldn't. I never found out why. That machine booted with a BIOS, not a UEFI, so I doubt if any of the ports were usb3.