USB Boot devices

[RedVyper]

I hope someone might have an idea as to how I can make this work. I have about 200 DELL PC"s mixed between GX150 and GX270 and GX60

I have created a multiboot DVD Rom with all our different Images for different departments which work GREAT on the machines that have a DVD ROM drive intenrally. I couldn't ask for it to work better.

However on the machines that do not have internal DVD ROM drives this does not work :-( I know I could use RIS or a network drive etc but I'd really prefer to come up with a way of doing it off DVD like i already have setup.

Here is the problem. We have Addonics DVD-ROM USB drives on our NON DELL machines that allow booting USB this again works PERFECTLY. however on the DELL machines they refuse to recognize the USB DVD-ROM as a boot device in the bios thus we can't boot from it.

I have checked with DELL for bios updates they all have the latest bios this has made no difference in our situation. I have called Dell Tech support and am getting no where. I get either its not possible or we don't support that.

I posted some questions in the DELL forumns and have been told DELL machines will not boot of USB CDROM however they will boot of USB FLASH or FLOPPY or HD.

So a thought that entered my mind might be. Can I make a boot sector on a USB flash device that would imediatly boot the USB CDROM and continue on as it would on the other machines. I really don't want to have to make two diff methods of doing this.

Has anyone else ran into this problem? Anyone have a better idea or solution or a way of making something like this work.

Obviously from waht I'm being told the ideal situion of just haveing the USB bootable DVD-ROM is not going to work on those machines.

Is it possible ot make a boot sector or something that would do what I'm asking for anyone know how or have any ideas what I might look for or into?

If this is something that would need a propritary boot sector written and coded or a programmer to do. We are in fact willing to pay for his services.

[x86]

You could make a nt boot flash and edit the boot.ini to boot from the cd-rom.

or install grub on the flash and set it up to boot from cd-rom.