SMALL BIZ ADVICE
What would you ask Michael?
The Dell Community has contributed: 9800 ideas | promoted 668512 times | 76318 comments

How IdeaStorm Works:

Post Promote Discuss See
290

Inspirons Need Selectable USB Boot Device Menu

290 points posted to Inspiron products by alfredska 12/15/07

The BIOS on Inspiron notebooks allows us to select:
Hard Drive, CD/DVD Drive, Network, USB

We need the BIOS to go further and actually let us select which USB device we need to boot. This applies to the boot menu that appears when F12 is pressed during startup. After the BIOS has gone through and detected hardware, it should be able to report which devices are connected to USB and give the option to select which particular one should be booted.

undead999
12/16/07
How many USB storage devices do you have connected to a notebook?
alfredska
12/18/07
I have 3 usb devices which could all potentially be bootable: two external hard drives and one flash stick. This issue affects me in the following way: I cannot have an external hard drive and flash stick plugged in at boot time if I want to boot from the flash stick. The BIOS always attempts to boot from the external hard drive. Thus, having Symantec Ghost on the flash drive and using the external hard drive as the backup destination does not work (MS-DOS is not hot-plug aware).
jdelidc
12/18/07
i used grub as a work-around
 
Atom feed track comments for this idea
Please log in to post a comment