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How to boot from USB?

GoStumpy

GoStumpy

Golden Member
I have this motherboard:

Zotac gf6100-e-e

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16813500045

And I don't have a DVD drive, I would like to boot from USB... Never done it before and so far it's not working..

I used unetbootin to burn the ISO to the USB drive, but I can't find anything in the BIOS for this motherboard to allow USB boot..

I found in the boot menu "USB-FDD", "USB-CDROM", but neither worked..

Thoughts?
 
Your USB stick needs to be FAT32 and have an active partition. Then you can for example copy the entire Vista or Win7 ISO to it and boot from it.
 
Three things.

One
If you have access to another computer, you may want to attempt to boot that computer with your USB stick. If it works then, you have isolated the problem to your Zotac machine.

Two
I'd keep looking through the BIOS on the Zotac machine. Also, I've found on my Zotac computers that they will boot from certain USB ports but not others.

Three
Zotac used to operated a forum that used to have pretty good info. If you haven't looked there yet, you might want to..

Best of luck,
Uno
 
Last edited:
Can't get it to work on either computer...

Followed the instructions in the link Meghan54 provided, the USB stick has identical files to my Win7 DVD, but no matter what USB port I put it in, it won't boot.

I have USB selected as first boot device, no workie.

Ideas??? Pulling my hair out!
 
Abwx said:
The USB drive must have a boot sector , otherwise the MB
wont detect it as a booting drive.

There s free utility softs to format it adequatly.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Click to expand...


As I said in my original post, I tried using netbootin and it didn't work...

However, I tried it again, further playing with BIOS settings, and I got it to boot to unetbootin screen, however it did not have any operating systems available to load??? Even though the USB stick has Win7 copied VIA unetbootin.

CONFUSED

-edit-

Upon reading unetbootin's website more thoroughly, it does not support Win7 booting.

I'd rather not install linux, trying to get Win7 to work on it... the Windows 7 USB download tool makes a proper Win7 image on the drive, allowing me to install windows from INSIDE windows, but it won't boot from the USB stick on a computer with a blank HDD.
 
Last edited:
The MS Store tool should make the usb stick bootable

or the way I do it manually, need access to win7/winvista machine

Extract the .iso somewhere (im going to assume c: \iso)

run command prompt as admin
diskpart
list disk
select disk # (# is your usb drive)
clean disk (this ERASES EVERYTHING on the drive)
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS quick
assign
exit

Make it bootable
using the bootsect.exe from vista/win7 dvd

Still in command prompt
cd c: \iso
cd boot
bootsect /nt60 driveletter: /force (where driveletter is your usb drive)

copy over items from dvd or extracted folder
 
GoStumpy said:
I'd rather not install linux
Click to expand...

Hmmm okay...

Not sure exactly what you mean. Linux can easily be tried without installing it to a hard drive. Puppy Linux will run perfect from a CD/DVD drive or from USB with no hard drive required at all! Puppy is small so it is quick to download and quick to burn. Another huge benefit is that Puppy is so small it will load completely to RAM and that makes it super responsive. Everything happens in a blink. While Puppy is small it has a fully functional GUI and it just all around rocks.

Puppy is perfect for browsing or media playback/streaming. It can do so much and it is so small it is just amazing. I'm not talking command line power, I'm talking point and click mouse power!

Anyhow it would be super easy to make a bootable Puppy or FatDog USB stick if you are interested...
 
Linux probably will be my end-all solution, however, getting a windows machine and a linux machine to share files / folders isn't exactly an easy task...

-edit-

Hurray! the Wintoflash program worked 🙂 Currently installing Win7 via USB
 
Last edited:
GoStumpy said:
Hurray! the Wintoflash program worked 🙂 Currently installing Win7 via USB
Click to expand...

Awesome!

I've got a Solaris ZFS server, a couple "FatDog" Puppy Linux boxes and a bunch of various kinds of Windows boxes as well. Getting them to talk to each other isn't all that bad at all. I normally do file transfers via the ZFS box rather than directly from one computer to another...

Anyhow I'm sure you don't care, now that you have Windows up and running.

Linux has come a long way if you haven't checked it out lately it would be worth doing, if are curious and get the time. Puppy is just amazing. It is free so it would only cost you a blank disk to check it out.

I run the 64 bit version called FatDog-64 because the BOINC project GPUGRID does not work on 32 bit Linux.

Sorry I can't seem to shut up... Puppy comes with a package manager that makes it super easy to add extra software (like say an nVidia driver or a different browser) in just a click. There is nothing to it.

I always check out new system builds with Puppy first rather than take the time to do a Windows install.
 
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