Boot to USB When Bios Won’t

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I've actually worked on a number of machines that will not boot to USB. Granted, this article may have a narrow use case by today's standards, but for that poor guy out there dealing with this problem, here you go.

At one point, nearly all desktop computers had a bios system by either AMIBIOS (American Megatrends) or Phoenix BIOS (Phoenix Technologies). These two major icons in the field were adopting the ability to boot to USB about the same time motherboard manufacturers started branching out with their own flavors of BIOS.

So there is a narrow period of time where it was really common to have USB ports on computers without the ability to boot to them.

Plop Boot Manager



I stumbled across Plop Boot Manager while dealing with just such a computer. This tool is incredibly small and I will even admit to having loaded it to a 3.5inch floppy in one specific case (chances are that'll never happen again). Most of the time however, I loaded this 544KB iso to a CD and booted the computer from the CD drive.

You'll want the download listed as plpbt-5.0.14.zip or whatever the latest version is (not updated frequently). Pull the plpbt.iso file from the archive and burn it to disc.

Put the CD in the tray for the computer in question and set bios to boot from CD. Once Plop is running, you select the device you want to boot to and you're there.

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