boot from USB Flash Drive

[comocho]

I was wondering if it was possible to boot Gigabyte Motherboards from a USB Flash drive and if so, then how.

I have a Gigabyte GA-8I915G Pro motherboard and a Kingston 1GB Data Traveler which i formated (FAT) using the HP formatting utility. I also used a win98 boot floppy to make it a DOS startup disk.

I then tried setting up the BIOS to boot from USB-FDD, USB-HDD, USB-ZIP & USB-CDROM all to no avail. even with all the usb options in the BIOS enabled, (even the redundant ones like enable usb kb and mouse. (mine are ps-2) and after updating the bios to version F9, it still wouldn't work. (it just loaded into windows xp.)
Only after I disabled the drives did it say that there was a boot disk error. (from the floppy) it never looked at the usb.

in the boot priority options I only get the 2 harddisks and a third option allowing me to boot from an ad-in card. (which didn't work.)

there is not flash drive emulation option available, (even after looking at the advanced options available (ctrl +F1) I looked for it on my friend's board. (also gigabyte and i couldn't find it either. )

I'm really stuck and could really use some help. is it really just not possible to boot from a usb?
thanks.

 

[elfantin]

I had the same problem with a GA-MA78GM-S2H (year 2009!).
It turned out that formatting FAT16 LBA (was FAT32) permitted boot.
I formatted it using Ranish Partition Manager, which was running on a freeDOS Virtual Machine (qemu) under Hardy. I passed the device /dev/sdb as an extra HD to the Qemu VM. I think that in the process the partition was also shrunk a bit (possibly to fit cylinder boundary); that might also have had a role (didn't double check).
Hope this helps someone,
elfantin

 

[roller11]

I was wondering if it was possible to boot Gigabyte Motherboards from a USB Flash drive and if so, then how.

I have a Gigabyte GA-8I915G Pro motherboard and a Kingston 1GB Data Traveler which i formated (FAT) using the HP formatting utility. I also used a win98 boot floppy to make it a DOS startup disk.

I then tried setting up the BIOS to boot from USB-FDD, USB-HDD, USB-ZIP & USB-CDROM all to no avail. even with all the usb options in the BIOS enabled, (even the redundant ones like enable usb kb and mouse. (mine are ps-2) and after updating the bios to version F9, it still wouldn't work. (it just loaded into windows xp.)
Only after I disabled the drives did it say that there was a boot disk error. (from the floppy) it never looked at the usb.

in the boot priority options I only get the 2 harddisks and a third option allowing me to boot from an ad-in card. (which didn't work.)

there is not flash drive emulation option available, (even after looking at the advanced options available (ctrl +F1) I looked for it on my friend's board. (also gigabyte and i couldn't find it either. )

I'm really stuck and could really use some help. is it really just not possible to boot from a usb?
thanks.

Yes it's possible. After you format your USB stick and make it bootable (FAT or FAT16), your board will see it as another HDD. Go into hard disk priority in BIOS and set it to the top. Reboot and your mobo will boot to your USB stick and give the DOS prompt

 

[bilbat]

I believe you need to set "Legacy USB support' to 'Enabled' to boot from USB, but I'd leave it disabled the rest of the time - it causes reboot loops with lots of USB devices...