Dell Dimension 4300 USB boot?

[budokai666]

I think the title is self explanitory.

i have the usb ports and a bootable usb. but i dont know how to boot from it because the boot menu does not offer the option.

 

[cboucher]

Try setting the boot to hard drive and see if an option comes up for your usb flash drive (the usb drive has to be present when you turn on the machine and go into BIOS). I've had that work on some older machines...

 

[budokai666]

Try setting the boot to hard drive and see if an option comes up for your usb flash drive (the usb drive has to be present when you turn on the machine and go into BIOS). I've had that work on some older machines...

what do u mean? when i went to the boot menu these are the options it gave me.

normal
diskette drive
hard-disc (C)
cd-rom

 

[cboucher]

When you select "Hard Drive C:" when the usb flash drive is plugged in does a submenu pop up or does it just go straight into booting from the hard drive? One other thing to try is going into BIOS (hit F2 after turning PC on) and try setting the default hard drive to your USB flash drive (drive has to plugged in to show up on list).

 

[budokai666]

When you select "Hard Drive C:" when the usb flash drive is plugged in does a submenu pop up or does it just go straight into booting from the hard drive? One other thing to try is going into BIOS (hit F2 after turning PC on) and try setting the default hard drive to your USB flash drive (drive has to plugged in to show up on list).

when i click F2, and click hardisk c , it tries to boot normally and it freezes

 

[cboucher]

do you mean F11? F11 should give you a boot menu. F2 should go into BIOS.

 

[budokai666]

do you mean F11? F11 should give you a boot menu. F2 should go into BIOS.

well my options are f12 or f2. f12 give me the boot menu and f2 give me the bios.

i was wrong in my last post

i clicked f12, then it went into my boot menu, then i clicked hard disk c

 

[cboucher]

I meant F12, not F11 in my last post, sorry. So yeah, you want to go into BIOS (F2) and look around in the submenus for references to boot sequence and a list of hard drives. When your USB drive is plugged in when you turn on the PC, it should be detected as a hard drive. What you want to do since it's not showing up on your F12 list is set the flash drive as your primary hard drive (place it as first on the list). That way, when you select boot from hard drive, it will try to boot from the usb drive since it is listed as your primary hard drive. Keep in mind that you may not be able to boot from a USB drive at all on this PC since it is an older model. This is what I have done on some older models and have been successful. Good luck...