Gigabyte P35-DS3L Can't Boot from USB Flash Drive

[jcossin]

Ok, I'm pulling my hair out on this one, so if you have any ideas, please help.

I've created a 4GB USB Flash Drive with Vista SP1 on it and it can be booted just fine from my Dell Laptop, but with my Gigabyte, the boot just locks up when it accesses the flash drive.

I have USB-HDD set as the boot device in the BIOS and I've also tried USB-FSD, USB-ZIP and USB-CDROM but only USB-HDD causes the flash drive to be accessed on boot but it just hangs after showing the post screen. System boots fine as soon as I take out the USB thumb drive.

I tried updating to the latest F9A bios, but same thing.

Any ideas?

 

[MrStryker]

What does your Dell laptop have that your Gigabyte board does not have? Did your laptop have any special options that allowed the USB drive to be booted?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Did you use the HP Flash Tool to make your USB drive bootable? Or did you use a different method, perhaps a Win98se boot disk and FDISK/FORMAT?

 

[jcossin]

On the dell laptop, there is an option for boot from USB storage device, and I made that the first boot device. It booted fine, so I know the flash drive is bootable. To make the flash drive bootable, I used DISKPART under Vista using instructions widely available on the web for creating a flash drive that can install Vista. It's definitely a problem with the mobo, but I'm hoping someone has this mobo and has had the issue and might know of a fix???

 

[Idontcare]

The reason (I suspect) that VirtualLarry asked regarding your method of creating the bootable thumb-drive is that is must have something to do with your specific issue.

I can tell you from experience that my DS3L's boot just fine using bootable thumb drives created with the HP boot drive utility. It's the only way I would do my memtest's on a new system.

Got five DS3L's and four different thumbnail drives right here that all do USB boot just fine.

If you are able to boot from a thumbdrive but cannot get Vista itself to load from the bootable thumb drive then that would be some other problem altogether (i.e. driver related, not so much drive related) IMO.

Have you isolated the issue to Vista booting off a thumb drive versus nothing booting off a thumb drive on your DS3L? Any reason to not give it a try just to see if you can confirm or deny VirtualLarry's suggestion that the boot drive prep process matters here?

 

[smb]

DID you try going to the Hard Drive boot options (hard disk boot priority) menu and setting the USB stick to the first option? that's what I do and it work fine. If you do it they way you said it doesn't work.

 

[jcossin]

Ok, I finally got it to boot. I stumbled upon someone on Google who changed the format from Fat32 to Fat on their thumb drive to get it to boot and it worked!

When it was Fat32 it booted fine on my Dell laptop, but it had to be just Fat to boot on the DS3L... Everything else about the way I created the image and the contents of the Vista image were the same. I installed Vista off the thumb drive and it is FAST!

One thing I'd like to try now is formatting the thumb drive using NTFS and booting. For some reason I don't feel good that my thumb drive is formatted using the old nasty FAT!

 

[hclarkjr]

Originally posted by: jcossin
Ok, I finally got it to boot. I stumbled upon someone on Google who changed the format from Fat32 to Fat on their thumb drive to get it to boot and it worked!

When it was Fat32 it booted fine on my Dell laptop, but it had to be just Fat to boot on the DS3L... Everything else about the way I created the image and the contents of the Vista image were the same. I installed Vista off the thumb drive and it is FAST!

One thing I'd like to try now is formatting the thumb drive using NTFS and booting. For some reason I don't feel good that my thumb drive is formatted using the old nasty FAT!

did you try ntfs to see if it worked? i am curious too

 

[smb]

it shouldn't matter what file system is used to boot. There are linux distros that are meant to be booted from USB keys.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm not so sure NTFS is bootable, where are you going to get the boot command.com files? The DOS bootable files don't work on NTFS drives.