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Drawbacks are that some older devices may not support USB booting and that the USB storage devices lifespan might be shortened. Ubuntu has included a utility for installing an operating system image file to a USB flash drive since version 9.10. [1] Windows support also has added a step by step on how to set up a USB device as a bootable drive. [2]
The BIOS uses the boot devices set in Nonvolatile BIOS memory , or, in the earliest PCs, DIP switches. The BIOS checks each device in order to see if it is bootable by attempting to load the first sector (boot sector). If the sector cannot be read, the BIOS proceeds to the next device.
To set up a live USB system for commodity PC hardware, the following steps must be taken: A USB flash drive needs to be connected to the system, and be detected by it; One or more partitions may need to be created on the USB flash drive; The "bootable" flag must be set on the primary partition on the USB flash drive
A modern PC's UEFI or BIOS firmware supports booting from various devices, typically a local solid-state drive or hard disk drive via the GPT or Master Boot Record (MBR) on such a drive or disk, an optical disc drive (using El Torito), a USB mass storage device (USB flash drive, memory card reader, USB hard disk drive, USB optical disc drive ...
Prior to the development and ubiquitous adoption of the Plug and Play BIOS standard, an add-on device such as a hard disk controller or a network adapter card (NIC) was generally required to include an option ROM in order to be bootable, as the motherboard BIOS did not include any support for the device and so could not incorporate it into the BIOS's boot protocol.
A modern PC is configured to attempt to boot from various devices in a certain order. If a computer is not booting from the device desired, such as the floppy drive, the user may have to enter the BIOS Setup function by pressing a special key when the computer is first turned on (such as Delete, F1, F2, F10 or F12), and then changing the boot order. [6]
Unlike the legacy PC BIOS, UEFI does not rely on boot sectors, defining instead a boot manager as part of the UEFI specification. When a computer is powered on, the boot manager checks the boot configuration and, based on its settings, then executes the specified OS boot loader or operating system kernel (usually boot loader [62]).
The Plop Boot Manager is a proprietary bootloader written by Elmar Hanlhofer. Plop Boot Manager can make computers boot from media that the original BIOS has no support for, such as USB or IDE CD/DVDs. [1] [2] Optionally, Plop can be installed directly onto the hard disk of a computer. [3]