Minus sign in BIOS in front of USB HDD listing.

[joe123]

I have been unsuccessfully attempting to create a bootable USB thumb drive setup for my Thinkpad. I’ve used disk part, the HP flash utilities, and some pretty specific directions from a number of web sites.

During the checking of my BIOS to confirm that my machine has that ability, I noticed a minus sign in front of the USB HDD. Does this mean that the ability of the machine to boot from a USB HDD has been disabled?

I’ve seen this question asked twice (2004 and 2008) in this forum, and a couple of times in other forums, for a variety of Thinkpads. No one has provided an answer, so far. If you have an answer, you are the master of PC arcania! Thank you. Joe

[davidspalding]

No mystery about this. On my T43 and X32, under hte BIOS "Startup" section, you move bootable devices up and down the priority list with F6 and F5. "X" moves a device to the "excluded" list. You can only have 8 bootable devices, so if you try to move something from "Excluded" and hear a beep, move one of the "included" boot devices to the excluded list.

Voila.

Tell us what kind of Thinkpad you have (the 7-character MTM model # on the bottom) and we could give you model-specific info. ... My guess, if the boot isn't working, it's possibly your flash drive image.

[rkawakami]

This has had me wondering too... so I booted my T41 and looked at the Boot menu. There are eight entries enabled, with "-USB HDD" being one of them. I shut down the system and attached my (free ) 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go drive and re-booted. The boot menu entry now shows "+USB HDD", so my assumption is that the "-" means that no drive is/was detected and "+" means that a drive has been detected and available for booting.

[joe123]

The order of the boot devices in the BIOS appears to be independent of the minus sign before USB HDD. No matter how you rank the drive, it appears with a minus sign.

The observation that the minus sign changes to a plus sign when a drive is hooked in is a very valuable clue. I appreciate the effort that you made.

Thank you, gentlemen! Joe

[joe123]

This has had me wondering too... so I booted my T41 and looked at the Boot menu. There are eight entries enabled, with "-USB HDD" being one of them. I shut down the system and attached my (free ) 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go drive and re-booted. The boot menu entry now shows "+USB HDD", so my assumption is that the "-" means that no drive is/was detected and "+" means that a drive has been detected and available for booting.

This evening I completed a BartPE setup using my OCZ flash / thumb drive. Once it was setup and my test boot was successfully completed, I restarted and went to my BIOS's boot device listing. Bingo! The USB HDD, which formerly had a minus sign in front of it, now has a plus sign in front of it. Mystery solved. Good job, Mr. Kawakami!

Incidentally, my OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB USB 2.0 flash drive (part # OCZUSBATVT4G) takes me from my Thinkpad splash screen to my BartPE splash screen in 38 seconds. I don't know how that stacks up with other USB flash drives, but I'm sure comfortable with that speed.

Thanks! Joe