Can't boot from external hard drive

[alteriks]

Hi I've got T42 and I've been trying for a few days to boot from external hard drive (usb) I've updated BIOS recently but this didn't help. USB disk contains openSUSE, which I tested on another laptop and I know that it boots corectly. The strange thing is that I have pendrive with another linux distro and I've been booting from it for 2 years. When I plug it in it bios corectly displays "+ usb hdd KINGSTON" when I attach my usb hard drive it isn't detected. Has anyone else had such problems with booting from exxternal hard drive?

[rbena]

At times a USB external hard drive would not boot up my Thinkpad. However, I usually had success booting up or at least accessing a difficult drive, when installing the drive in the hard drive ultrabay adapter for my Thinkpad.

[SteveS]

USB drives won’t boot in T4x series unless they are formatted using a special IBM/Lenovo utility. It installs some hidden files to enable reading the root system files. The utility was supplied with certain Lenovo and IBM flash memory, but would not work on other vendor’s flash drives.

I have read that HP had a format utility that would make flash drives bootable in T4x series, but I have never tried it.

BTW, this was not way to lock you into accessories from Lenovo/IBM. The T4x series was one of the first computers to allow booting from USB, even though it is restricted. USB requires a lot of SW overhead to support it – and is a real burden to support in a BIOS. The T4x series offered only limited support and was supplemented by the systems files on the flash drive.

[richk]

Does the drive have an external power supply? It is possible the port isn't putting out enough power.

[aldtech]

USB drives won’t boot in T4x series unless they are formatted using a special IBM/Lenovo utility. It installs some hidden files to enable reading the root system files. The utility was supplied with certain Lenovo and IBM flash memory, but would not work on other vendor’s flash drives.

I have read that HP had a format utility that would make flash drives bootable in T4x series, but I have never tried it.

BTW, this was not way to lock you into accessories from Lenovo/IBM. The T4x series was one of the first computers to allow booting from USB, even though it is restricted. USB requires a lot of SW overhead to support it – and is a real burden to support in a BIOS. The T4x series offered only limited support and was supplemented by the systems files on the flash drive.

While I have heard something about that a few years ago I am not so sure that is true. I have just booted my T40 using my Bart PE loaded USB drive with no problems and have done so in the past when building/configuring my present T40. Now I have and do use this drive on other different brands of laptops and it has always worked so I think I might look somewhere else.

alteriks - does that new usb version of openSUSE work on other platforms or just the one you configured it on?

ALD