Inspiron 1100 booting from USB stick.

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@wolperdinger wrote:

For a quite a while I am trying to boot my Inspiron 1100 to a USB stick (128MB), which I am not very successful with. I changed the BIOS setup so the machine will try to boot from a USB device. Although I don't know how to make the USB stick bootable. Under Windows I seen that whenever the stick is plugged in 2 drives will appear and one of them is drive A: for some reason, which belongs to the USB device!! Anyway I can write the startup files (for booting) to drive A: but not the other drive which houses the other USB stick memory, under Windows the startup file copy option is not available. I copied all startup file from A: to the other drive, but both drives indicate on computer startup that there is a disk error, meaning the booting ain't work. Where is the problem and what files do I need to write to the USB drive to able to boot from it? I assume during startup the BIOS will recognize the USB stick as a whole, not as Windows does and splits it up in two drives (such as A: and F:).

My current BIOS version is A029.

Any help is very much appreciated. 

 

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Download and install the Dell Diagnostics Bootable USB Flash Drive utility linked in my sig below.  If your system supports booting from a USB drive, you can then select F12 during bootup and select to boot from this flash drive.

see if this thread helps, http://forums.sudhian.com/messageview.cfm?catid=43&threadid=39177

Thanks for the input so far. I was able to install the suggested dell diagnostics software and booted from the USB stick. Well the problem I am having right now is that I'd like to access the harddisk or CD-rom drive which doesn't seem to possible now as the computer is exclusively booted from the USB drive only and no other drive can be seen. How can I boot to the USB drive only including having access to all the other computer drives as well?

Thanks in advance.