Booting from USB

[ChrisH]

I have a room full of abit VA-10 Mohterboards which I boot of my USB stick when I need to reinstall. I have to select the USB zip/LS120 option to get this working. Now thats all fine but I have know done some repairs and had to buy the upgrade the VA-20 which only really has serial ATA as extra.

These refuse to boot of my USB stick no matter what the boot option is! Fair enough I though so rather than faff with that I plugged in a DVD drive thats in a USB 2 enclosure and set teh option to USB CD and still nothing!!!

Im going to try a BIOS upgrade but I doubt that will fix it. ANy ideas?

[tarquel]

The bios update will be your best bet - they may add the option that they "forgot" in a later revision

 

Also, try enabling the bios option of boot other devices and see if you can boot then, but try the bios update first I'd say.

 

Regards,

Nath.

[Diello]

We had a simular thing with some Dell workstations that had no FDD. The BIOS didn't support assigning a USB device to A - and since the scripts we were trying to run were tied to running from A 8O Dell claimed they had no intention of updating to support that feature... makes you wonder about the worlds largest computer seller rather...

[tarquel]

And that completes (and starts lol) my point for not going for Dell PC's (not starting a war honest lol) but Dell defining things like that isn't for me

 

Other manufacturers support it still so why are Dell phasing it out? Because they dont want it themselves anymore so it means that no one else does? Ha.... I think not lol

 

/rant over

 

 

Nath

[ChrisH]

BIOS upgraded.

Boot other was already set.

 

 

May try a different drive in the enclosure but im grasping now...

 

I just want it working so I know when it comes to reinstall I can do whatever I need that doesnt involve opening the dam cases.

[Diello]

I got bloody bull-horned into buying aload more of the darn things (wonders if they still glue the heatsink to the processor...) - in my defense, I'd only been here a day and hadn't stamped by authority yet As always, I shall be proved right

[Ric_]

Chris... can't you do a PXE boot and pick up your files off the network?

[ChrisH]

Chris... can't you do a PXE boot and pick up your files off the network?

 

Thats the kind of thing im going to move to eventually as I only need to replace one rooms NICs to get them all to PXE. But for the time being I was keeping it simple. Would I need some kind of DOS disc image to make a machine PXE into DOS or whatever I want or can it just copy the files over?

[Geoff]

presumably these machines have no floppy drives?

[ChrisH]

Definately no floppies. I dont need to be going around pulling bits of metal out of them all day