From reading many web pages out there, I got the notion that a lot of
BIOS'es out there can boot from a "USB mass storage device" but have to
treat them as "removable media" devices. AFAIK, this implies that they
must NOT be partitioned (i.e. no partition table and signatures in the
first few sectors).

My conjecture is that this causes failures for a lot of people, because
for large USB hard disks, Windows (the NT family) requires that you
partition them before you can format them.

I have seen how Linux can circumvent this problem because you can format
a raw hard disk as a whole, in the same way you can format an individual
partition. Windows OS's don't allow that (because we users are too dumb
to know what we're doing).

Anybody can confirm or refute my rant? :)

gecko wrote:
> I didn't think you could. I know I never could when I had an external
> HD connected to my USB. Anyway, my friend now has an older HP machine
> he picked up, with which he is having a problem getting it to boot. He
> says the BIOS states the 'boot order' to be USB Device followed by
> Hard Drive (c:\). Strangely, so he says, when he put a bootable CD
> disk in the CD Drive thereon, the system booted up from there.
>
> Does all this make sense?
>
> Anyone?
>
> Thanks
>
> Gecko