Booting Issue

[ghines]

Hi all,

I have an external USB HDD with WinPE 3 installed on it. I use it to load images using imagex onto various models of Dell laptops. Generally this goes without a hitch and works very well for me. However every now and then I get a laptop that will not boot from the USB HDD. The HDD comes up in the BIOS and is an option in the boot menu after pressing F12, but you get the message "Operating System not found" after selecting the USB HDD as the boot option.

Anyone come across this before?

BTW - Makes no difference if I use a USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 port.

TIA

Greg

[jaclaz]

Anyone come across this before?

Yes.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/questions-with-yes-or-no-answers.html

Now, should the question actually be:

How do I solve this issue?

The quick answer is "it depends".

The long answer being "it depends", there are quite a lot of possible "quirks" in the way BIOSes handle the USB booting, my increasingly OUTdated pages reports some of them (FAQ#10):

http://jaclaz.altervista.org/Projects/USB/USBfaqs.html

The way the device has been paritioned/formatted and the Size of the primary partition, besides the size of the whole device may play a role in booting or completely fail to.

The most "comprehensive" solution nowadays is usually the "NON-standard" partitioning through FBINST:

http://reboot.pro/9460/

http://reboot.pro/7932/

http://reboot.pro/11753/

but there are more (bad) BIOSes then stars in the sky, and DELL's are re-known to be normally a PITA, so YMMV .

BTW, if you use a USB 3.0 port, unless the PE has USB 3.0 drivers "integrated", you will get a BSOD 0x0000007b anyway.

jaclaz

[Tripredacus]

First you need to determine where this "Operating system not found" message is coming from. The BIOS (unfortunately) isn't very helpful in telling you what it is trying to boot from when it shows you this message. It could very well be that that notebook isn't even attempting to boot off the USB drive and goes directly to the HDD and fails. You should try taking out the internal HDD, and then try to boot off the USB HDD to see if that works or not.

There are some other questions we might have such as:

1. What is the size of the boot partition?

2. Do you have multiple partitions on the USB drive, and if so, is the WinPE partition the first one on the disk?

[ghines]

There are some other questions we might have such as:

1. What is the size of the boot partition?

2. Do you have multiple partitions on the USB drive, and if so, is the WinPE partition the first one on the disk?

There are 2 partitions on the USB HDD. The first partition 2 GB and contains WinPE. The remaining space on the 1TB drive contains another primary partition that holds all my images.

Greg

[Tripredacus]

What is the actual formatted size of the boot partition? Some BIOSes do not support booting 2GB+ over USB. If you can do a test, build a bootable WinPE using a small USB to see if it works on those problem computers.

[ghines]

What is the actual formatted size of the boot partition? Some BIOSes do not support booting 2GB+ over USB. If you can do a test, build a bootable WinPE using a small USB to see if it works on those problem computers.

Formatted size 1.95GB.

Will try your small USB suggestion when the issue next happens.

Thanks,

Greg