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Easiest bootup device that works on all pcs 99% of the time

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pcslookout

Lifer
What would that be please? Floppy, USB, CD, LAN, ... ? I wouldn't think floppy sense that has been phased out for a while now.

Oh and wasn't sure where to put this so if the forum here is wrong please move it thanks.
 
pcslookout said:
What would that be please? Floppy, USB, CD, LAN, ... ? I wouldn't think floppy sense that has been phased out for a while now.

Oh and wasn't sure where to put this so if the forum here is wrong please move it thanks.
Click to expand...

Assuming the computer has an internal floppy drive installed, then that's the mostly likely to boot device to actually work. My current PC's BIOS doesn't like something about one of my CD-ROM boot disks and won't boot it. My 8GB USB key will only boot on about half the PCs I've tried it on.
 
Ross Ridge said:
Assuming the computer has an internal floppy drive installed, then that's the mostly likely to boot device to actually work. My current PC's BIOS doesn't like something about one of my CD-ROM boot disks and won't boot it. My 8GB USB key will only boot on about half the PCs I've tried it on.
Click to expand...

Well this opens another can of worms then. What is the most reliable portable media to be used as a boot device? Floppy, CD, USB, ... ?

If I remember right floppies are highly unreliable media storing devices.
 
I prefer the swiss army knife approach. Carry one of each: floppy, USB flash drive, and bootable CD/DVD. Hopefully, one of them will work with the target machine.
 
VirtualLarry said:
I prefer the swiss army knife approach. Carry one of each: floppy, USB flash drive, and bootable CD/DVD. Hopefully, one of them will work with the target machine.
Click to expand...

Good approach and that is exactly what I would do too. The problem is what lead to my last question. What happens if the only one that you need fails though ?

For example lets say the computer only has a cdrom/dvdrom drive and the cd or dvd won't work anymore. What then ? Remember the motherboard's bios won't let you boot from usb either and there is no floppy drive.
 
pcslookout said:
Good approach and that is exactly what I would do too. The problem is what lead to my last question. What happens if the only one that you need fails though ?
Click to expand...

Then it doesn't work. What if the cd drive in the computer is broken? What if the floppy drive is broken? What if a mugger steals your cd, floppy, & flash drive as you walk from your car to the person's house or office building?

How about asking the full question you really want to ask?
 
cubby1223 said:
Then it doesn't work. What if the cd drive in the computer is broken? What if the floppy drive is broken? What if a mugger steals your cd, floppy, & flash drive as you walk from your car to the person's house or office building?

How about asking the full question you really want to ask?
Click to expand...

Wow you give up that easily. Amazing.
 
In some cases you should bring a CD and a DVD if necessary for older PC's. I remember trying on several PC's with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive that it would not read my DVD+R media. In those cases, a bootable CD works well.
------

But as others have said, I'd try USB first (my trick is to put an OCZ Onyz 32GB in a USB 2.0/eSATA enclosure - its fast like gangbusters). If that doesn't work, go the DVD/CD route.
 
Floppy
CD
USB
Laptop + patch cable + boot from lan

Compact flash with IDE and SATA adapters.
It is small and will boot anything out there old or new. Open case, plug into port and boot.
You can do it with a hard drive too, but CF interfaces are sold that require no external power or use USB for power.

PCI card is last resort and they are very hard to buy, most people make them. When a bios boots it hands off control to the video card bios for just a second. The cards take that control and do not return it to the bios , instead running the custom code the pci card has installed. These are used quite a bit on pc that have a password that will not reset even if battery is removed.
 
jiffylube1024 said:
In some cases you should bring a CD and a DVD if necessary for older PC's. I remember trying on several PC's with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive that it would not read my DVD+R media. In those cases, a bootable CD works well.
------

But as others have said, I'd try USB first (my trick is to put an OCZ Onyz 32GB in a USB 2.0/eSATA enclosure - its fast like gangbusters). If that doesn't work, go the DVD/CD route.
Click to expand...

Modelworks said:
Floppy
CD
USB
Laptop + patch cable + boot from lan

Compact flash with IDE and SATA adapters.
It is small and will boot anything out there old or new. Open case, plug into port and boot.
You can do it with a hard drive too, but CF interfaces are sold that require no external power or use USB for power.

PCI card is last resort and they are very hard to buy, most people make them. When a bios boots it hands off control to the video card bios for just a second. The cards take that control and do not return it to the bios , instead running the custom code the pci card has installed. These are used quite a bit on pc that have a password that will not reset even if battery is removed.
Click to expand...


Now that is more like it! Thanks guys! Very creative ideas and suggestions!
 
The USB ports closest to the PS/2 ports are the most likely to allow boot-up.
These may work, even while other USB ports may fail.
Also: the USB device must be inserted for that boot option to appear in the bios setup menu.
 
Just a plain old CD is the best option.

Have a USB as backup.

Floppy disk is pointless. I haven't even touched one in years.
 
As much as I liked Floppy drives for MS-DOS boot disks they are not even on their way out they ARE out for any sort of recent PC. You can't even buy a reliabe / brand name floppy drive anymore. Just look at the reviews of the Nippon Labs and ByteCC internal floppy drives at NewEgg.

USB Flash drives to me are more convenient than even CD-ROM or DVD-ROM disks since they are rewriteable allowing you to bork a couple times and not coaster disks in the process.

Pretty much any PC since 2003-2004 can boot from one but sometimes you have to go into BIOS and change the bootup device to something like USB-HDD or USB-Floppy.
 
Any recommended USB sticks? Are they all bootable now? I have an old Lexar Jumpdrive that I can't make bootable. I'm hoping all new USB sticks with 16gb of space will work. Any preferred brands?
 
pcunite said:
Any recommended USB sticks? Are they all bootable now? I have an old Lexar Jumpdrive that I can't make bootable. I'm hoping all new USB sticks with 16gb of space will work. Any preferred brands?
Click to expand...

The 8G USB stick I bought less than a year ago won't boot up on most PCs I've tried. I believe the problem is that it reports itself as being a removable device which causes BIOSes to use floppy drive emulation instead of hard drive emulation. Older smaller USB drives are more likely to avoid this problem as the BIOS floppy interfaces support some pretty big "floppies", up to 512MB I think.

As far as what current USB drives would be the most boot compatible, that's a good question. Not being able to boot from my USB key has become a real problem lately.
 
Well I've only used my 512MB Sandisk Cruzer Titanium I bought 5-6 years ago but a friend of mine has successfully used a 4GB USB Flash Drive and copied the Windows 7 DVD to it to make a bootable install disk.

I think for old BIOS bootable USB flash drives you may have a hard limit of 32-bit DOS 4 GB but I'm not sure of this.

There really should be no difference booting from a 16GB flash drive and a 20GB internal hard drive.
 
nenforcer said:
There really should be no difference booting from a 16GB flash drive and a 20GB internal hard drive.
Click to expand...

There's quite a bit of difference between the two. In the normal boot up sequence the BIOS is used to by the inital boot block to load the rest of boot code, but the BIOS only has interfaces for accessing floppy disks and hard drives. Any other boot device, like a USB storage device or CD-ROM, needs to be emulated as either floppy or hard drive for this boot process to work. Also BIOS code for accessing hard disks is old and stable, a few new things like IDE detection and LBA support have been added over the years, but it's based on the same code that booted old ST-506 contollers (and probably still can). You'd think the USB stack in BIOS'es would've settled down by now, but then again they designed new standard controller interfaces for USB 2.0 (and again for USB 3.0).

This is why I said, if it were still available on 99% of PCs, then an internal floppy disk drive would be the most likely to work 99% of the time. The basic hardware interface hasn't changed since in IBM introduced the orignal IBM PC, and hasn't changed at all in over 20 years. I'd be suprised if any of the BIOS manufactures' code for handling floppies has had a single line changed in a over a decade.
 
I'm looking at the Patriot Xporter XT 16GB usb key, it seems highly recommended for this sort of thing, booting live cd's ... the Sandisk Cruzer also.
 
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