To boot your new server thumbdrive, your BIOS has to support booting from USB devices. Mine happens to show the USB thumbdrive as another Hard Drive, so when my machine boots I press F12 for boot device options and then select "hard drive".

Here is a quick snippet from this article which describes ways to boot from USB devices on some common BIOSes. 

Depending on the BIOS of your computer, you can set the USB stick as a boot device.
If your PC's BIOS does not seem to support this, check if there is an update for the available BIOS!
Your milage may vary :-)

For some reason most BIOS'es prefer to refer to the thumbdrive as a USB Removable Floppy Disk or USB Zip Disk.
Please email me settings if you found settings that work for a particular BIOS.
Please DO NOT send me questions. Please ask them in the FORUM so others can read the replies as well.

Tip: Some AMI BIOSes require you to enable the option "USB Keyboard Legacy support"!
For example: the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe - with thanks for the tip to Fernando from Spain!

 

* Generic approach

	If your BIOS is not in the list below, or the settings do not seem to work with your PC, then do this:

	- Go into the BIOS
	- Go to the page that determines the boot order (usually called "Advanced Setup", "Boot options", or "Feature Setup")
	- Try all USB drive variants. Start with "USB ZIP", then "USB FDD", "USB HDD ", etc.
	- To speed up the testing, DISABLE ALL other boot devices. This goes for the 2nd, 3rd etc, but also for so called "Alternative boot devices".

	  

* AMI BIOS

	Depending on the version of your AMI-BIOS (enter using the "Del" button):

	Option 1;
	This refers to an AMI-BIOS I found on my own spare computer.
	AMI refers to it as "AMIBIOS SIMPLE SETYP UTILITY - VERSION 1.21.12".
	(version number may vary)

	Go to "Feature Setup".
	"Enable" these options: "USB Function Support", "USB Function For DOS" and "ThumbDrive for DOS".

	Go to "Advanced Setup".
	Set the "1st Boot Device" to "USB RMD-FDD".

	Reboot the PC and it now should boot from the Thumbdrive.

	Option 2;
	Settings I found on a German website (www.chip.de).

	Go to "USB Mass Storage Device Configuration".
	Select "Emulation Type" and set it to "Harddisk".
	Go to the "Boot Menu" and set the "1st boot device" to "USB-Stick".
	No you can exit the BIOS, saving the changes. If this does not seem to work, then you can try (it sometimes seems to work) setting the "Emulation Type" value to "Floppy" or "Forced FDD".

		   

* PHOENIX/AWARD BIOS

	On my Shuttle XPC (SN85G4), the Phoenix/Award BIOS:

	Go to "Advanced BIOS Features".
	Go to the "1st Boot device" and set it to "USB-ZIP".

	Tip from Daniel Butler: I have a Phoenix BIOS, Revision 6. After a lot of frustration, I found that you need to go to the Boot Order screen and select "Harddisk" and hit enter, giving you a list of IDE hard drives - for some reason, this BIOS prefers to call a USB device an IDE harddrive...but whatever. :)

	And that's all. Reboot the PC (Exit the BIOS saving the changes) and see if it wants to boot from the thumbdrive.
	Of the 5 PC's I tried, 4 where succesfull.