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I managed to install SysRescueCD on USB flash drive so that it boots a dell laptop, but for some reason it doesn't boot a desktop PC that I have. The BIOS provides 3 different options to boot from USB (zip, cdrom, floppy) but none manages to boot from that USB flash drive.

Is there a solution or workaround to this problem?

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Which BIOS/board is it? How old? Is USB booting enabled, and in right order for booting? Some boards give you different emulation modes for USB storage devices, might want to experiment with these. – Marcin Sep 22 '11 at 13:51

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

Many BIOS are fussy aout the type of boots they will allow for USB. You could try using a different boot manager and/or PBR to see if that helps things along.

If you set the USB for floppy emulation, for example, try setting it for hard drive emulation. Probably the best tool for that is BootIce.

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You can use Plop Boot Manager. On your BIOS it's obviously not possible to boot from USB. But you can use Plop to boot from CD, floppy or HDD and from there you boot again from your USB drive. That's one of the main advantages of Plop. Go, give it a try, it worked for me.

For your hardware restrictions you need another medium in between as a workaround anyways. So the dissapointing answer is: it won't work with every BIOS directly. The second and described above is: There's this workaround.

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