Booting from external USB CdRom

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 PIII 850
Something bad must have happened to it in the last week or so. One memory
slot and the DVD stopped working.
The floppy disk works intermittently, and it won't be long until it dies,
since The DVD rom had the same problem, worked at times and then went belly
up.
I have a USB external CD/RW drive and I was wondering if I could use it to
boot up the PC and load a new OS. I went to the boot options in the BIOS but
I couldn't find anything that refers to USB boot up. The bios version is the
A23.
Thank you

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

As a rule, P3 systems lack the ability to boot from an USB external device.

.... Ben Myers

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 09:59:34 +0800, "jen mcrae" <starfishgalaxy@bigpond.com>
wrote:

>Hi,
>I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 PIII 850
>Something bad must have happened to it in the last week or so. One memory
>slot and the DVD stopped working.
>The floppy disk works intermittently, and it won't be long until it dies,
>since The DVD rom had the same problem, worked at times and then went belly
>up.
>I have a USB external CD/RW drive and I was wondering if I could use it to
>boot up the PC and load a new OS. I went to the boot options in the BIOS but
>I couldn't find anything that refers to USB boot up. The bios version is the
>A23.
>Thank you
>
>