# Booting from USB



## jokkemokke (Oct 5, 2009)

Hi. I have an old PC, which I would like to use as a diskless server, rather than trowing it away. Unfortunately the BIOS does not support USB disks.

I have installed the PLOB bootloader on a floppy disk, and with this I have been able to load the BTX bootstrap on a 4 Gb USB stick, that contains a bootable installation of FreeBSD.

But when BTX is started, it says that it cannot find the disk it was booting from, because there is no BIOS support for USB disk, and therefore it cannot continue loading the kernel.

Is there another way, that I can make FreeBSD boot from a USB disk on a PC without BIOS support? I can boot from floppy and cd.


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## aragon (Oct 5, 2009)

The only way is to build floppies with a usable kernel on them.  Once the FreeBSD kernel is loaded it will be able to access the USB drive.


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## jokkemokke (Oct 5, 2009)

Would it be possible to make a bootable system on a CD, and then spcify in the fstab file on the CD, that it should mount the USB drive containing the system, and then continue loading the system from the USB drive, once the kernel has been loaded?


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## aragon (Oct 5, 2009)

Yes.


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## jenaniston (Jan 7, 2010)

*booting the USB OS when BIOS doesn't support USB*



			
				jokkemokke said:
			
		

> . . . Unfortunately the BIOS does not support USB disks.
> 
> Is there another way, that I can make FreeBSD boot from a USB disk on a PC without BIOS support? I can boot from . . . cd.



If you can boot from CD then this shouldn't be a problem at all - try ploplinux on a CD iso . . .
http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinuxdl.html 

As a chainloader, ploplinux will direct the boot to other devices - like USB - even if there is no BIOS support - or - if the USB is lower in boot sequence and you can't get into bios setup.

If you can get to the screen that looks similar to below, just highlight the USB choice and <enter> . . .
The (rest of the) boot will be directed to the files on that device.


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