USB Key Boot problems

Hi, I'm evaluating True Image for our company and I am trying to test the USB key bootabilty with Dell Latitudes. After using the "Create Bootable Rescue Media" option, things look OK, but then the computer never boots to the USB device.

The BIOS of the machine is setup to look at the USB devices first and I've tried using the boot menu (of the machine) to hit the USB device first manually and it can never do anything with the USB key.

I've tried on Dell Latitudes (D600 and D620). The USB key is a Cruzer Mini 256 MB. A norton ghost USB key works just fine, btw.

Thanks for any help.

 

Hello sticksj,

Did you format the USB key as FAT (FAT32 won't work)?

I'm not familiar with Dell Latitudes but do you have other USB boot options to try e.g. USB CD-ROM, USB Zip, etc? If so, try each in turn.

Unfortunately there is currently no universally agreed (and applied) "Boot from USB device" standard, albeit the "Big Boys" are busy working on it. Therefore there is still no guarantee that any combination of USB key, motherboard BIOS/USB-subsystem and application will boot correctly I'm afraid.

Regards

 

Hi, thanks for the response....

It was formatted at FAT32, but I changed that, reran the TI stuff and still no joy. Just to test out the whole thing, I used an HP utility that they have that will boot one of their linux kernels for maintenance on an HP box. That worked just fine, so I am fairly confident that from a hardware standpoint, I'm good.

Now I just have to make TI work. Is the Make Bootable stuff supposed to really make it bootable? Or would it expect something like a ms-dos bootable disk to already be there?

Just as a note... When I run the Make bootable stuff, on the summary page, it says that I'm creating a Floppy Disk...

any other ideas?

 

Well, I just did the whole thing again... Formatted the USB stick to FAT, ran the TI Make bootable thingy, (I just chose the 'advanced' one this time,) and then rebooted and this time it worked. I've got no idea what I did differently, (other than not taking the default with both the simple and advanced images,) but I guess I don't really care.

Then I pulled the trigger and trashed my c:\ part and did a restore from the usb boot and an image stored on another disk and it just worked.

Lovely.

thanks for the help.

 

All's well that ends well . By the way, the "Creating Floppy Disk" message is normal.

Glad I was able to help.

Regards