Is external CD bootable?

[gilgamish]

I have an HB (not HP) USB external CD drive.
if i need to format a PC having CD drive, and decided to use that ext. CD drive, is it possible to accessable from the DOS mode,with or without a bootable CD.?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Whether it can be booted from depends on the BIOS on the motherboard. Some very new ones allow it, most don't. Whether it can be seen from DOS depends on whether you can get DOS drivers for the USB CDROM. There is no single standard driver for this. You'll have to search around, the manufacturer of the drive may have one. If you use a bootable CD, the driver will have to be part of the image and in the config.sys just like a floppy boot disk.

And sword is spelled sword. 🙂

 

[corkyg]

As Lord E said, most mobos don't allow USB device boot. I have two relatively new P4PEs, and their BIOS does not allow that. Same for Firewire. But - you might want to play with this idea . . .

USB

 

[gilgamish]

OK, A silly suggestion. what if i get a USB-to-Parallel interface converter? will this save the situation?

 

[Lord Evermore]

I didn't know there was such a thing as a converter to use a USB drive on the parallel port (just the other way around). If there is (and it'll probably be expensive), then you would still need to have drivers that would recognize a CDROM on the parallel port, since that's not a normal IDE connected drive that most drivers support. You might look for the "backpack" brand drivers and see if they'll work for other parallel-connected drives.

 

[Horsepower]

Would enabling legacy usb support help the situation?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Legacy USB support just means the USB keyboard and mouse can work in DOS. It still doesn't mean other devices will work without drivers.

 

[tdowning]

well as far as USB to parallel, I know that there are divices made to allow you to connect a Paralel printer to a USB port on your PC, not sure if it works the other way though....