Problems booting from USB

[opiumsmoker]

Hello guys this is my first post, and well I don't know how pertinent is my question...

I have a AMD Athlon 64 3000+, and I'm trying to install Fedora from an USB drive, can I boot from USB?

When I enter the BIOS the 3 options I get are:

USB-FDD
USB-ZIP
USB-CDROM

I tried them all and nothing works

[rokytnji]

Not with those choices will a usb flash pendrive drive boot. If you have a floppy drive. You can make a plop floppy to boot usb pen drive when bios does not support this. I have done this successfully installing AntiX 11 from Pendrive on a ancient IBM A22m with no usb boot bios support. Don't install plop into your internal hard drive as a bootloader. Just use the floppy disc to boot off of pendrive. I don't do rpm distros so not sure if this will work for Fedora.

Plop - Boot Manager - Free Boot Manager, builtin usb driver, native usb, boot different operating systems, cdrom, usb, freeware, option rom bios

[Rubberman]

You might be able to get an updated bios image that does support booting from USB flash drives.

[devils casper]

I agree with Rubberman. Most of new machines support USB Boot up. You should check website of your MotherBoard Manufacturer for latest version of BIOS. If latest version of BIOS is available, check its changelog/new features detail.

[atreyu]

I've got a machine that supports booting via those exact same three options (along with the other standard ones) and I can tell you I got it to boot with USB, np.

I got it to work using the USB-ZIP method. I used a current version of syslinux (4.x). I did it all manually, but you should be able to google for a good guide, or even a script that'll do it for you.

In a nutshell, I created a 4th partition on my USB disk (e.g, /dev/sdb4; sdb1 thru sdb3 can be dummy partitions, actual partitions or not even there). I enabled the boot flag on the partition. I made it of type FAT16. I then ran syslinux on it, put a syslinux.cfg on it, and some kernels I wanted to boot and that was it.

I think you can also emulate USB-FDD by creating a FAT filesystem on your entire usb drive (e.g., /dev/sdb) b/c floppies do not have partition tables. I got that to work, too, but I wanted the USB-ZIP method b/c I could put syslinux on /dev/sdb1 also and have newer BIOS PCs boot from that partition, too. That way, I'd also have room on sdb2 or sdb3 to put live filesystems (e.g., Rescue Linux or Clonezilla).

hth