Boot from USB without BIOS Support; In the following tutorial, I cover how to create a PLoP Boot Manager CD that can be used to force boot from USB without BIOS access. This is also useful to boot a USB on computers with a system BIOS that does not natively support booting from removable USB devices.
The PLoP Boot Manager created by Elmar Hanlhofer, works by first loading essential USB drivers, CD/DVD drivers, and hard disk drivers. The user is then presented with a (Boot Menu) menu of possible boot devices detected by PLoP. The user can then proceed to select a device to try and boot from.
Table of Contents
PLoP Boot Manager (Boot Menu)
Distribution Home Page: PLoP Boot Manager
Boot from USB without BIOS support
One way you can Boot from USB without BIOS support is to use the PLoP USB Boot Manager. Here's how easily it's done:
- First, download PLoP boot manager, and extract the files from the Zip to your Desktop.
- Next, burn the plpbt.iso to a CD using your favorite CD/DVD burning software.
- Then, insert your newly created PLoP Boot CD and your pre-prepared Linux USB flash drive.
- Finally, reboot your PC and set your System BIOS to boot from the CD.
If all goes as planned, you should now be presented with an alternate Boot Manager similar to the one pictured above that can be used to boot your USB flash drive or other device.
Note: In some cases the removable flash drive will actually appear as a fixed hard disk.
Alternative Method to Boot from USB without BIOS
As an alternative, you could just use a Virtual Machine like VirtualBox to boot from a USB drive. Then you wouldn't even need to reboot. For more information, see the tutorial on How to Run VirtualBox from USB.
