There is a trick in the BIOS to booting from USB or SD cards, it is a bit counter-intuitive, but it can be done.
Plug in the USB/SD card and power up the webbook, press del straight away to enter the BIOS.
On the Boot tab don’t go into the tempting looking Boot Device Priority section, go to the Hard Disk Drives bit.
Swap the order so that the USB device is the 1st drive and the SATA drive is the 2nd drive.
F10 to save and exit
now it will boot from the USB.
When you are done, remove the USB and power down.
If you switch on and try to boot now it won’t do it, you will get a scary sounding error message saying Base-code ROM ID structure was not found., reboot and select proper Boot device.
Don’t Panic!
Power down and up and go back into the BIOS and back to the Hard Disk Drives bit. For some reason the 1st drive is listed as disabled, change that to enable the SATA drive and then you will be able to boot from it again.
That error message was because it was attempting to do a network boot, but the network boot ROM was turned off. If you want to boot from the network you have to go back into the Boot section of the bios and enable the PXE Configuration Execute bit. If you don’t know what PXE and TFTP are then you don’t need to worry too much about this!
This is an AMI BIOS “feature” – if a memory card or USB stick is below a certain magic size (530MB, IIRC) it’s emulated as a removable device with permanently installed meda – if it’s larger, then it comes up as a HDD device.
@peter, wow, so size does matter then! I thought it was an age thing as I have a couple of really really old USB sticks that worked fine in the boot device priority order, I guess they just happened to be under the size limit.
Couldnt get it to work one my 2gig SD or 1gb usb with deb or xp.
Well, after a bit more experimentation, I have discovered that you can persuade the BIOS to boot a larger card as a removable device – the trick is that it can’t have a partition table on it, and the filesystem has to start at block zero. If you use mkdosfs -I on the whole disk device (say /dev/sdb) and then syslinux /dev/sdb the card will boot.
wow, very interesting discovery! I will be trying that one out.
Hi,
I have problems with my webbook. Sometimes it does not boot at all, a error message saying something like “Insert boot media in SD USB”.
Can I create a boot media for SD or USB? If yes how?
Now the webbook is running. It started again after 2 days (I probably tried to start it 50 times). Now I will not shut it off. Please tell me what I can do.
k
Thank u a million in advance!
/Micael
Ps. I am no computer Geek… but have been into the Bios and seen that u can change priority of booting. However I have never seen hard drive there, only SD/USB and network Realte
sounds like a hardware issue to me, especially if the hard drive is not being recognised by the bios. I managed to cook a webbook by leaving it on in a case, the hard drive stopped working for a while but eventually it cooled down and started working again.