As the subject says, I'm trying to boot from an external hard drive which is attached via USB. I have a rev 3.3 Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with F11 BIOS that should support this, but it is not working for me. Worse, I'm not really sure where to start poking around for answers on how to get it to work. Anyone out there got any ideas?

Some additional background info:

I've tried booting with the BIOS setting for "Legacy USB storage detect" both enabled and disabled. No joy either way.

I have Linux Ubuntu 7.04 installed on the hard drive I'd like to boot from. I have had no problems booting from this drive when it is directly attached as an internal HDD. I also have no problems with my PC "seeing" the USB attached external drive when I have booted either Windows XP (my primary OS) or Linux Ubuntu 7.04 (booted from the Live DVD). (I actually did a "text mode" install of Linux to the drive while it was attached via USB).

I've tried Googling for info on this topic, but haven't found anything helpful so far. Most of the info out there seems to focus on booting from a USB "thumb" drive rather than from a USB attached hard drive. At this point I'm starting to wonder if this actually works for anyone at all out there. Perhaps it's not something other people actually do but rather just something everyone assumes can be done.

-john, the confused dinosaur

Is the drive showing up in the bios? I think it should show up as a disk when choosing the hard drive boot order. I have booted from a USB flash drive on a rev 1.3 before. If I remember correct, it was detected and showed up as a boot option in the bios. I would think a USB hard drive would show up in a similar fashion. You probably need to have "Legacy USB storage detect Enabled".

No, it does not. My F11 BIOS boot options for the Gigabyte 965-DS3 work like this. I can select a first, second, and third boot device setting from the following list of devices: Floppy, LS120, Hard Disk, CDROM, ZIP, USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, LAN, Disabled.

Currently my BIOS boot devices are set as follows:
First Boot Device: USB-HDD
Second Boot Device: Hard Disk
Third Boot Device: CDROM

There is another list of hard drive priorities available from another menu in the BIOS. This lists all the hard drives which are attached internally via SATA, PATA, or a PCI adapter card. However, USB attached hard drives do not show up in this list. In other words, this list only prioritizes the "Hard Disks" which are connected "internally".

If you specify booting from a USB-HDD and there are multiple USB-HDD attached, I would guess the BIOS is supposed to function the same way it does when booting from CDROM if I have multiple CDROMs with bootable CDs. But I really have no idea how it is supposed to work since at this point I cannot get it to work at all.

-john, the confused dinosaur

Hmmm. I'm stumped. I'm fairly sure the usb flash drive showed up under the hard drive boot options for me. This was on a rev. 1.3 bios F10. However, I built this computer for a friend, so I no longer have it and and can't check. Try plugging in a usb flash drive and see if it shows up in the bios.

This is embarrassing, but you were right and I was wrong. I don't know why I stated in my OP that the USB attached hard drives do not show up in list displayed when you select "Hard Disk" as the boot option. I must have found this to be the case at least in some way when I made that post. But whatever I thought then, that is in fact how things seem to work.

When I press F12 and select "Hard Disk" as the boot source, the USB attached external hard drive now does appear in the selection list of hard disks that the BIOS displays. I have found that I can successfully boot Ubuntu from my external USB drive by selecting it as the boot source using this method.

Probably the most frustrating aspect of this experience was the complete lack of useful information from Gigabyte support. I received very prompt replies to all my posts about my problem to their support board. However, all of the replies contained stonewalling questions. Questions like "Was linux installed on the hdd from this system or was it from an different system?" and "The OS was loaded on this motherboard?" and finally "What kind of external hdd you are using or what kind of enclosure does it uses?"

I mentioned at least 3 or 4 times in our exchange that I had set the first boot device to USB-HDD but Gigabyte tech support never told me that this does not work. I strongly suspect that whoever was answering my questions actually knew less about booting from a USB device than I do. And that's both very sad and very lame and very, very disappointing.

While I suppose that's where this tale will end, I still have some questions.

The most obvious question is what on earth the BIOS option to boot from USB-HDD is supposed to do. It clearly does not work for me. I cannot boot from a USB attached hard drive by specifying USB-HDD as the boot source. :?

At one point I thought USB-HDD worked for me to boot from a USB Flash Drive. But I've tried that again and it also does not work. Instead the USB Flash Drive also shows up in the list displayed when I select boot from Hard Disk.

Another question is why I cannot select which USB device to boot from? If I have both a USB Flash Drive and a USB HDD attached, I can only boot from one of them no matter which one I select from the "priority list". I'm guessing that the BIOS just takes whichever USB device appears to be "first" in some internal USB device list. But why list all the USB devices in the hard drive priority list if you cannot actually select the specific USB HDD device you want to boot from? :?

-john, the confused clueless (essentially) dinosaur

I think there are two issues at work here, the 1st of which is wether or not the USB thumb IS actually configured as a 'mass storage device'. That phrase is key to solving the prob as some thumbs are recognized as a flash drive... unsupported in bios, HOWEVER that is fixed with the new Vista thumbs.

I had this issue 9 months ago when for farts and giggles I tried to load a thumb drive onto W98se. DRIVERware is key. A particular 3-letter brand had awful driver code, and even left the name blank. (Problem big-time in W98se, as its 'null'). Once the ini was tweaked, the thumb loaded properly.

Of course, it died 60 days later as most of these particular brand of thumbs do. But it could image a 3.5Gb HDD of op-sys.

2nd is wether XP whatever will actually LET you do this... I would thoroughly investigate user/admin privilidges and restrixions. Might be a maze to get it to accept.

I do not recommend imaging anything absolutely essential onto a stick, thats why CD-R was invented.

JMH2c

f61

Not sure what you mean. The flash drive shows up in the WinXP device manager as a USB Mass Storage Device so I assume that is how it is configured. No?

As for using a flash drive with W98SE, that would have separate problems, wouldn't it, due to the much less robust support for USB in that OS. I know my Lexar Jumpdrive Pro requires the installation of a device driver for Win98SE to recognize it.

I haven't noticed any problems booting from the flash drive now that I finally realized I have to look for it under the Hard Disk boot source and not use USB-HDD as the boot source which was my more original naive expectation. But I still don't understand why the USB-HDD boot source does not work. It doesn't make any sense to me.

The lack of any real information about how the USB boot setups work is very frustrating.

-john, the irrational, confused dinosaur