Boot order for flash drive

[Jon Danniken]

Hello,

I am trying to run memtest86+. I have a flash drive, upon which I loaded
the boot software from memtest.org.

Unfortunately, I cannot seem to get it to boot.

In my BIOS, I have boot order options for USB which include usb-fdd,
usb-hdd, usb-zip, and usb-cdrom. I tried setting it to usb-cdrom, but no
go.

Should there be a selection for USB-flash drive, or possibly another
approach to this?

Mainboard is a gibabyte ep45-ds3L. Thanks for any suggestions.

Jon

 

[David W. Hodgins]

Hello,

I am trying to run memtest86+. I have a flash drive, upon which I loaded
the boot software from memtest.org.
In my BIOS, I have boot order options for USB which include usb-fdd,
usb-hdd, usb-zip, and usb-cdrom. I tried setting it to usb-cdrom, but no
go.

With my current system, the usb drive will only show up in the bios
selection, if there is a valid mbr on it, with a partition marked
bootable. It then shows up in the list shown when I select the
"hard drive boot priority".

See http://forum.canardpc.com/showthread.php?s=b899636429860b1c1beae438057aafba&t=28875

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[Jon Danniken]

With my current system, the usb drive will only show up in the bios
selection, if there is a valid mbr on it, with a partition marked
bootable. It then shows up in the list shown when I select the
"hard drive boot priority".

Ah, there it is, many thanks, David. I ended up trying all of the usb-*
options, but none of them worked. Tried your suggestion of looking in HDD
boot priority, and it was right there.

Jon

 

[Paul]

Hello,

I am trying to run memtest86+. I have a flash drive, upon which I loaded
the boot software from memtest.org.

Unfortunately, I cannot seem to get it to boot.

In my BIOS, I have boot order options for USB which include usb-fdd,
usb-hdd, usb-zip, and usb-cdrom. I tried setting it to usb-cdrom, but no
go.

Should there be a selection for USB-flash drive, or possibly another
approach to this?

Mainboard is a gibabyte ep45-ds3L. Thanks for any suggestions.

Jon

On one occasion, I've done a "dd" of a floppy, and transferred that
verbatim to a USB stick (1440K image) and it worked. It booted.
I was kinda shocked, when it booted. I didn't think that would work.
It was an MSDOS floppy.

It's very much a matter of experimenting, because of all the
variations in level of support in the BIOS.

The BIOS on my current machine, doesn't have those options like yours,
and does its own "auto" thing, when I use the popup boot menu.
(I press F8 for the popup boot - my previous motherboard
used F11 for the popup boot menu). See if your machine
has a popup boot menu, and try from there.

Another bit of advice. I keep two different sizes of USB sticks
here. I have an 8GB stick, for "cooperative" situations. But if
I need to use something like the HP formatter, that may fail to work
on a large stick. You may have better luck in that case, with a
2GB stick or smaller (supported by one of the lesser FAT versions).
As a result, I keep a 1GB stick here, for cases where a tool simply
refuses to look at the 8GB stick. It can be hard to find the smaller
sticks now, so that isn't always an option.

http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Trav...14M2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301530729&sr=8-1

You'll notice in that advert, they mention other size sticks as well.
They want more money, for the 1GB one, than for the larger ones

I just checked my DataTraveller 1GB stick, and it has a copy of
"Debian Live" on it. And one of the boot time options of that
Linux install, is memtest You'd be surprised, how many different
tools offer a copy of memtest of some vintage. If I were to plug
that stick in, a Linux boot prompt would show up, and typing
"memtest" into the prompt, would start a memory test, rather than
booting Linux.

Paul