On any new machine I purchase I ensure to thoroughly run all hardware with the various diagnostic applications available on the Ultimate Boot CD. I have the UBCD setup on a USB drive which allows me to ditch the CD wallet. Problem is, even in this day and age, there are still machines I encounter that are not compatible with USB boot. Most of the time I’ll burn an ISO to CD and hook up a spare CD-ROM drive, but recently I was determined to get the computer to boot to USB. No BIOS update was available and I searched every inch of the BIOS menus looking for a USB boot option with no success. So, after some browsing around I found PLoP. PLoP is a Boot Manager that will (among other things) allow a machine to boot to USB even without BIOS support. It’s actually quite an easy solution but does require you to make either a floppy or CD. Since the machines I was working with were previously used in a cluster they had no CD-ROM drives but they did contain a floppy drive. To create a PLoP boot disk using another Ubuntu machine I completed the following:
wget http://download.plop.at/files/bootmngr/plpbt-5.0.10.zip sudo apt-get install unzip unzip plpbt-5.0.1.0.zip cd phpbt-5.0.10/
Insert the floppy to write to into the drive. I’m assuming it’s located at /dev/fd0.
fdformat /dev/fd0 dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
Once you complete this you have created the bootable floppy and can now boot the machine to the floppy which contains the boot manager. You will need to ensure that the installed floppy drive is listed on the boot list. Note that the ISO is also included in the downloaded package if you would rather create a CD.
After you boot into PLoP there is a list of available boot options. USB should be an option in the list and you simply select that as the boot option, press Enter, and your USB bootable drive can now be accessed! Note: Once booted to USB I could *only* use PS/2 keyboard and mouse with the machine.