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I currently trying to understand if my motherboard supports booting from USB flash drive or not...

In motherboard manual it written: "First/Second/Third Boot DeviceSpecifies the boot order from the available devices. Use the up or down arrow key to select adevice and press to accept. Options are: Floppy, LS120, Hard Disk, CDROM, ZIP,USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, LAN, Disabled"

Is there way to boot from 8GB USB flash drive?

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    What part of "StackOverflow is for programming questions" are you having problems with?
    – Paul Tomblin
    Nov 15, 2011 at 17:42
  • Just a simple quick question
    – user1048125
    Nov 15, 2011 at 17:43
  • There's a dedicated site for hardware and such. Your question will be migrated there.
    – Blender
    Nov 15, 2011 at 17:44
  • Have you actually tried (for example) "USB-HDD", or any of the other options?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 15, 2011 at 18:22

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Do not use any of these options.

Instead, hit F12 after power up to enter the boot menu. There, choose + HDD: this opens a new list of devices. Your USB stick should appear among them.

If this is not the case, you should check/try a number of other things.
Warning, you may have to do some voodoo tricks on top of that.
Try by order of priority (or do all of them at once):

  1. Reboot and enter BIOS settings. Under Integrated peripherals, make sure things like Legacy USB, USB Controller, USB Storage are enabled.
  2. Unplug all other USB devices, excepted the keyboard (if you have a PS/2 one, use it instead of the USB one).
  3. Use Rufus software to rewrite your USB from a CD/DVD iso. (Make sure to use the small arrow near Format options to drop down the advances options, and tick compatibility options for old BIOSes.)
  4. Some reports tell you should try over and over hot plugging the USB stick during BIOS loading, and eventually it ends up showing.
  5. Flash your BIOS to latest version available. Some people in previous link recommends downgrading it instead.

Remember, you should at each try ask for boot menu (F12 on Award BIOS on Gigabyte), then choose + HDD and there check if your USB stick appears in the list.

You may also give up actually BIOS booting from the USB stick and choose some alternate solution.
The nearest one is in my opinion using Plop Boot Manager. It can replace a Windows boot loader for giving you an option to boot from other devices instead, including USB drive. This allow you to dodge a buggy BIOS unable to detect your stick itself.
And if you do not want to alter your disk with Plop Boot Manager, you may instead put it on a floppy disk (yes, I still have that) or a cd, boot from them, and then use Plop to boot your USB stick.

Or you completely give up your stick and use another kind of bootable device (DVD, CD, ...).
This was not working for me, indeed I tried first with a DVD, re-burn a second one, was not working... Maybe bad DVD-R, maybe bad reader... So I have tried with USB... But then, "thanks" to that P35-DS4 Gigabyte mobo, it took many other hours of fiddling... I had to go till step 3 (combined with 2, not tested them separately). And I had flashed my BIOS (using a floppy disk) to latest version many tries before.

Most of the information I have written were on this blog and its comments.

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  • Mobo died some time ago in power surge, but thanks for extended answer anyways. Hope this helps someone finding same question.
    – enflam3
    Feb 27, 2017 at 5:49

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