3 replies to this topic

[ktp]

A friend of mine told me that he got MAC OS X Leopard (for x86) booting well from USB HDD. I do not know whether the OS could be installed directly to USB HDD (as with Ubuntu), but at least it seems to work by installing first to the internal disk (IDE), then put the IDE HDD to external USB HDD enclosure.

So it seems only MS XP/Vista with their BSOD 0x7B have problem with USB boot, Linux and Mac OS X are USB boot friendly.

[Brito]

So it seems.

But I think that Vista is also USB friendly as well.

Doesn't it allow installing from USB and being installed to USB from a virtual machine running this USB disk as a logical emulated drive to later allow real hardware USB boot?

[ktp]

@Nuno Brito

VMware simulates a SCSI disk (not a real USB) so the test is not valid. On real hardware, booting USB HDD with Vista will not work, if you do not set the correct entries usb* (Starttype=0, Group=Boot bus extender), and be careful, after each Windows update or other USB mass-storage/hub plugged, these registry keys will be changed back to startype=3 Group=Base, and on next reboot you will get BSOD 0x7B.

What I found is to save the different keys to .reg files, that before rebooting execute them to be sure on next reboot :-).

[Brito]

Always good to learn a bit more, thanks!