[How To]Boot from a USB drive without BIOS support

[Adrianhb]

Thanks for your prompt reply. What I am really looking for is a solution similar to your scenario where USB boot is not supported by BIOS and I need to be able to use a bootable CD to do so. As it does seem that LILO can boot DOS/Windows 98, I was guessing it might be possible to do so with an approach similar to yours if my goal is to use a CD to boot DOS/Windows 98 from an external USB HDD. Any suggestion?

585664333[/snapback]

This is the sort of thing I too want to do, and I'm interested to see that zachman123 had some success.

I'm a bit unclear how the boot process works in this sort of case. I've been able to boot into DOS, run a DOS USB driver and a driver that makes the filesystem visible (of a USB-connected HDD, but presumably it might equally be a Flash drive). The HDD has Win98 installed. But I failed to start Windows from DOS.

AFAICS zachman booted to DOS, got USB access, and invoked Windows from the command line. Windows98 doesn't seem to have a win.exe file, it normally starts from DOS by running the config lines in the msdos.sys file. Zachman, I'm not clear whether you copied Windows files to the boot CD, would appreciate more info on what you did.

I admit I don't understand the boot process well, but I can't see how you could boot far enough to get USB access, and then say 'now use THIS MBR', pointing to a partition on the USB device. But from what I can see, this is what LILO does.

[djbrak]

By any chance, how can I do this with Ubuntu? I tried mounting the initrd.img and I get an error. How can I create the boot ISO from scratch using Ubuntu 7.10?

Thanks!

[Gundamdriver]

Thanks, but I won't do this anyway.

I don't think I want the computer to spin and read from CD for minutes and then boot from USB drive. I would get a new MB instead, nowadays many MB supports boot from USB devices.

[Skulltrail-old]

I'm assuming this will NOT work when the BIOS is configured to booting into HDD before all else: (N)