FYI? Non-booting USB 3.0 Flash drives on T60 planars

[JGTC.co.jp]

Evening everyone!

Just confirmed this on both of my Signature's T60 and T60p: when attempting to boot from a USB 3.0 Flash Drive (Kingston DataTraveler G4), the BIOS does not recognise the drive as bootable. Still, when inside an OS, it acts normally on registering itself as a Mass Storage device with no issues whatsoever.

Since I have performed just a minor test with a single device, have you seen any other issues with USB 3.0 devices on T60 planars?

[Cigarguy]

I found USB 3.0 flashdrives will not boot on a lot of mostly older machines, not just a T60. For this reason I use USB 2.0 flashdrives.

[dr_st]

I'm surprised that it has anything to do with the physical layer (USB 2.0 vs 3.0). I have seen that certain machines do not recognize certain types of bootloaders, though.

[xsixt]

Not sure if this related or a separate issue...

On machines with USB 3.0: Boot USB drives (e.g. Windows 7 Install) don't run correctly if you put load them up using a USB 3.0 port - it runs but then complains about missing drivers, and the drivers won't install even if you point to the correct directory.

Works completely fine when run from a USB 2.0 port.

[jdrou]

Not sure if this related or a separate issue...

On machines with USB 3.0: Boot USB drives (e.g. Windows 7 Install) don't run correctly if you put load them up using a USB 3.0 port - it runs but then complains about missing drivers, and the drivers won't install even if you point to the correct directory.

Works completely fine when run from a USB 2.0 port.

Basically the same situation as installing WinXP on SATA; Win 7 doesn't have any USB 3 driver built in and the ports don't fallback to USB 2 functionality (and don't have 'compatibility mode' available in BIOS as SATA usually does). You can slipstream USB 3 drivers into Win7 install just as you can slipstream SATA drivers into WinXP installer.

Regarding the OP, I've seen a lot of glitches with USB booting on older hardware. There are buggy BIOSes and some that don't like higher-capacity drives or particular models and so on. Thinkpads in particular had some issues with booting certain versions of syslinux bootloader using memdisk.