Booting X40 from Zip Drive

[hgdenos]

I have an SSD for my X40 and am trying to install Windows. I can't get the computer to boot from the USB zip drive. I have checked the bios and the USB is enabled. I have tried setting the bios to boot from both the USB FDD and the USB HDD and to no avail. The bios recognizes both my SSD drive and the "cruzer" zip drive but still will not boot. I know the zip drive will boot because I tried it on another notebook and boots with no problem. I just updated the bios to the latest. Any help will be appreciated.
Gene

[RealBlackStuff]

Have you tried pressing F12 at startup?
It gives you a menu with choices of what drive to boot from...

[hgdenos]

Yes, I have fiddled with the bios and enabled USB and changed the boot order several times. I did get an idea from your response and the accompanying ad. I have updated the bios, now I will try to update the chipset.

[hgdenos]

I updated the chipset. No luck. I still can boot from zip drive. Anyone have any ideas?

[RealBlackStuff]

In the BIOS, check that Config/USB support is enabled.
You talk about a USB zip drive, that is ancient technology.
I presume you mean a USB flash drive or pen drive?

Is this helpful? http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

[hgdenos]

I figure zip/flash/pen/thumb are all the same...more or less.
Other notebooks boot from the drive, the X40 doesn't.
Any other ideas? Thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

X40 is on a par with the T23, technology from early ~2003 I guess.
May be too old to be useful...
OR, you did not make a proper bootable USB drive.
Try methods other than what you have done so far.

[Bruce Guttman]

I know this is a somewhat old thread, but it's germane to my problem.

I have an X41 (non-Tablet) that was given to me without a hard drive. I have the dock and tried to create a Pen Drive in the USB with a normal XP install. After install It won't boot from the pen drive, and the F12 does show it.

I don't have the thing here, so I can't give details beyond it being a 2525 with the Fingerprint.

Is there some special trick to creating a bootable pen drive from a Windoze XP install disk?

[Tasurinchi]

Just to ask the basics, are you sure the USB stick you are using is bootable? I'm asking because once I had a couple of (very cheap) sticks that I could not make bootable by any means.

Otherwise the procedure should be quite straight. I have no experience with XP, but I did create a bootable Win7 stick using the software PowerIso. This link explains the steps for the creation of an XP stick...

If you just need to any stick to test the X40 you can try installing a Linux distro on a stick, which is dead easy, see here

[Bruce Guttman]

I can report success.

The first USB stick had some proprietary junk on it, so I tried one that has nothing.

Windows still won't boot, but I got Ubuntu 10.04 to work fine (I didn't have a newer version at hand). Apart from taking a day and change to download some 500 updates, it now works. It's slower than a "real" hard drive, but it does the job. It's not my primary laptop; in fact I don't think I'll be doing much with it anyway, but it has been a good learning experience.

Thanks for all the help.