GX280 : Booting to USB Hard Drive

Question

The GX280 User Guide only refers to booting from a usb floppy or memory key. What I would like to do is to boot into a usb hard drive, with Windows system mounted on that same drive and run that system as if it were mounted on an internal ATA drive.   I appreciate that, were this possible, my system would run a factor of 2 or 3 slower than if the drive were internal, but it would solve the following problem ....   In addition to the GX280 (running XP), I have a few  legacy Dells running Win98SE and each set up to run different bits of specialised applications, e.g. chip blowing, which I now use very infrequently but nevertheless need to keep in case of need. It does not seem worth the hassle to set these applications up on the GX280. Thus I have simply preserved a row of PC carcases taking up space, just on the off-chance that I might need to fire one of them up at sometime ! It would be more efficient in space to trash the carcases and just save their PATA hard-drives. Then if I wanted to fire one of them up, I could put the hard drive into an external usb drive enclosure and boot into the usb drive on the GX280. (Even though slower than if it were on an internal drive, such a system would probably be as fast as the legacy hardware was !)   Alternatively I suppose that I could open up the GX280 and simply replace a drive on the IDE bus (say the floppy ?), by the legacy hdd, (or use a SATA bridge ?) but it would be nice to avoid all that.   Another solution to the problem might be to run VMWare on the GX280, but that seems like overkill.   As no-one else seems interested in this, I suspect that I must have seriously misunderstood something. Is there an inherent problem in Windows preventing one booting from and running a system on the usb ?   Thanks very much for any advice,   Mjeuk

Mjeuk · Answer

PS to mburd :   forgot to add comment that the usb enclosure was externally powered.   Regards   Mjeuk

mburd · Answer

The 1st generation of GX280's had a hard/impossible time booting from USB devices. Updating the BIOS did not work well. The last generation/batch were supposed to have that capibility. Things to do:

1. Turn off Legacy USB Support in the BIOS. Could really help.
2. Update BIOS.
3. When did you buy it question??
4. Remember, USB on GX270-280 do not work right. They do not provide enough power to USB ports for devices. This is both an XP + Dell problem. I bet that this is the problem, along with the age. Cannot have a powered USB hub for this either.

What you might want to try is to get an 8 GIG USB drive and see if it will boot to this device. Those keys do not require a lot of power.

Otherwise, you are stuck.

Mjeuk · Answer

Thanks very much mburd.

- the GX280 was purchased November 2004 and runs BIOS level A03

- I actually tried booting from a usb drive enclosure containing a Maxtor 90640D4 (11Gb, 5400 revs - should be lowish power ?) carrying a bootable Win98SE system

- The system refused to boot with a message complaining about the boot record

Do you reckon that a later model would solve my problem of the multiple geriatric systems that I need to keep on a back burner, or should I just sit back and wait a year or two (nursing my row of old machines) while these problems to get ironed out ?

Thanks again for your time

Mjeuk

speedstep · Answer

You have to make an Active partition and boot record. That means fdisk and format with USB Dos disk or
utility like M systems util that does this.

I have several generations of GX280 and all of them boot fine from usb.

Storage, Drives & Media

GX280 : Booting to USB Hard Drive

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