Boot from a USB drive even if your BIOS won’t let you

Think about this: You have that one USB flash drive that you always use to help solve your computer problems. But what if your PC’s BIOS simply will not let you use it? We cannot solve this issue exactly, but we can show you workarounds, using a CD or floppy disk that will let you boot from your USB drive. 

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Introduction:

The boot menu has four options: “Removable Devices,” “Hard Drive,” “CD-ROM Drive,” and “Network boot from Intel E1000.” This boot menu does not have an option to boot from a USB drive, as it was created before USB drives became cheap and accessible. 

One piece of freeware known as PloP Boot Manager solves this problem by offering an image that can be burned to a CD or put on a floppy disk, thereby enabling you to boot a variety of devices, including your USB drives.

Here are two ways to do this(CD or floppy disk):

1. Put PloP on a CD: PloP comes as a zip file, which includes many different files. To put PloP on a CD, you will need either plpbt.iso or plpbtnoemul.iso from that zip file. Either disc image should work on most computers, though if in doubt, plpbtnoemul should work “everywhere,” as stated in the “Read Me” that came along with PloP Boot Manager. 
2. Put PloP on a floppy disk: Should your computer be old enough to still have a floppy drive, then you will need to put the contents of the plpbt.img image file in PloP’s zip file on a floppy disk. To do this, we will need to use a software called RawWrite for Windows. It should be listed in the Floppy drive drop-down box, from which you select your floppy drive, then click on the “…” button and browse to plpbt.img. Once that is done, press the “Write” button on the bottom right to write PloP boot manager into your floppy disk. 

After all that, you will need to boot PloP Boot Manager. 

You will need to have your CD or floppy drive boot with higher precedence than your hard drive. You may not have to worry, however, as in most cases, especially with floppy disks, this is done by default. 

If the CD or floppy drive is not set to boot first, then you will need to access your BIOS’s boot menu, or the setup menu. Exact steps to do this will vary depending on your BIOS, so it is best to search for your motherboard’s manual to get a more accurate and detailed description of the process. If you are working with a laptop, this can be found in the laptop manual. 

In general, as the computer boots up, some important keyboard strokes are noted prominently somewhere on the screen. Press “ESC” to bring up the boot menu. Since we burned a CD with PloP Boot Manager on it, we can select the “CD-ROM DRIVE” option and hit “Enter.” 

If your BIOS does not have a boot menu, you will need to access it from the setup menu and change the boot order to give the floppy disk or CD-ROM Drive higher precedence than the hard drive. This setting is usually found in the “Boot” or “Advanced” section of the Setup menu.

If done correctly, PloP Boot Manager will load up and give you a number of boot options. Highlight “USB” and hit “Enter.” PloP will begin to load from the USB drive. And now, even though your BIOS did not have the option, you are booting the USB drive, which would display whatever you had saved in the drive. 

This is a rather long-winded way to get your PC to boot from a USB, but it works. If your BIOS won’t boot from a USB, it probably has one, or it is highly outdated and you need to update it.