BIOS doesn't support booting from USB 3.0 ports

[furball4]

Just a warning to anyone who hasn't noticed this yet - I wasted some time on it thinking the bootloader was hosed on my USB hard drive. Apparently the USB 3.0 drivers aren't available to the BIOS. They are actually on a separate chip. So even with USB booting enabled in the BIOS, USB thumbdrives and hard drives won't show up as boot options when plugged into the blue-colored USB 3.0 ports. You can get around it by plugging them into the USB 2.0 port in back, the yellow-colored one. Would be nice if we get a BIOS update that fixes this at some point.

[Chatbox]

I came across this when I was trying to install Windows 7 from a harddrive (yes, I've prepped a portable drive so that I can install to a system from USB).

The USB3 is currently still not implemented into the Intel chipset (it's on the NEC chipset, I think)....and getting USB3 support is only available in some environments. And I think this is why Lenovo decide to keep a USB2 port available on the system.

[furball4]

It's too bad, because heftier USB-booting applications, like yours and mine, could certainly benefit from the increased transfer rates. I'm using a bootable USB hard drive to image the system partition while it isn't in use. I could always use a thumbdrive for booting and still use the USB hard drive via 3.0 for the actual backup target, but I prefer to have less pieces in the puzzle. I wanted the USB hard drive to do double-duty.