P3 Award BIOS Has No Usb Boot Option

rawmess · 02 Dec 2013

first of all , please forgive me if this is a re - post . before this thread gets modified, please point me to a helpful post instead .

so , I ' m trying to install windows xp on a very old p3 with no usb port on the casing . so , i have to use an external hardware ( please see screenshot ) to be able to use usb . i ' ve verified the usb to be bootable . but the problem now is the BIOS doesn ' t seem to show the option to boot from USB ( screenshot ) . i ' m not able to use CD / DVD to boot since the upper IDE slot is not working - fixing it is not an option for me . the hardware to use USB must be okey ( already checked with replacements ) . the HDD is blank so i can ' t enter windows to update BIOS either . any help in this situation would be really appreciable . thanks in advance .

patio · 02 Dec 2013

USB not showing on boot menu

USB boot support came way after P3's went to market...

TVeblen · 02 Dec 2013

Yep. You answered your own question! P3 Award BIOS Has No Usb Boot Option!

You will need to find a way to boot from a CD on that machine.
Now on the motherboard there are 2 IDE connectors: Primary and Secondary. I think you are saying the Secondary connector is not working, but the Primary is.

And IDE ribbon cable has 2 connectors on it: Master and Slave. You can connect the hard drive to the Master connector and the CD-Drive to the Slave connector and they will both run on that one working Primary IDE connector.

If your ribbon cable is a 40 wire cable then you must jumper the hard drive as Master and the CD as Slave.
If you have an 80 wire ribbon cable then you can either do as above or jumper both drives as Cable Select.
If the connectors on your ribbon cable are not labeled then the convention is that the end connector (sometimes color coded Black) is the Master and the mid connector is the Slave (sometimes color coded White). The connector that goes on the motherboard is the one that is furthest from the other two (sometimes color coded Blue).

If you mean that the second connector on the cable is not working then just get a new cable.
Or get a second cable and connect the CD to the Secondary connector on the motherboard.

LMiller7 · 02 Dec 2013

The ability to recognize a USB device and the ability to boot from such a device are very different things. When Windows 98 was introduced the USB port was intended primarily for such things as a keyboard or mouse and using such a device as a disk drive wasn't supported natively until Windows 2000. To boot from a USB device requires BIOS support and in the early days the standards were not yet finalized. I have an old Pentium 4 system that will not boot from USB. Many systems newer than that don't support it either.