cant boot off of USB HDD

[cleeve]

Hey guys, i just reformatted. I went through the setup, it detected the usb hard drive, formatted it, installed all the setup files, restarted again(where it would now boot off of the usb hard drive), and it wont work. It keeps defaulting back to the SATA drive. I disabled the SATA controller and set it to boot on USB HDD and it brought up the whole "no hdd with an OS found" message.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Do you have legacy USB support enabled in BIOS?
Tas.

 

[Brentx]

Also, can you boot off of a USB device in your BIOS? It has to be supported in the BIOS in order to boot off of it.

 

[cleeve]

Originally posted by: Brentx
Also, can you boot off of a USB device in your BIOS? It has to be supported in the BIOS in order to boot off of it.

well i would imagine so, otherwise i wouldn't of been able to set "USB HDD" as a boot device in my BIOS.

 

[corkyg]

You were not clear on how you prepared the USB HDD. If your BIOS supports USB boot (as you indicate) then the way to do this is to remove the SATA drive from the system, and set your BIOS boot order to CD-ROM followed by USB HDD. Then boot with the Windows CD and install it on the USB HDD so that the MBR, etc., are correctly placed.

The bigger question is - why on Earth would you want to boot from a slow USB HDD as compared to either SATA or IDE?

 

[kilnsea]

If Cleeve was using the external USB drive as a backup/clone/ghosted drive, he'd want to test that it booted to the OS. Just a guess.