I tried searching around for this before I asked the question, but nothing was found. So, my question is, in the BIOS Boot options, you can boot from HDD, Optical, Floppy, Network.

Since the TR doesn’t have an attached floppy drive, does this mean the TR can boot off an external floppy drive?

The real reason I am asking is because I was looking in the BIOS to see if the TR could boot off the memory stick slot. Ideally, if this could happen, then a person could simply insert a memory stick with the preferred operating system and not worry about partitions or even having a hard drive installed.

I guess my other question would be, being able to boot from the memory stick slot, is this something that would be a BIOS update flash or is it hardware based on the motherboard?

I have been patiently waiting for ANY 32GB SSD from Samsung to become available, but even when it does, it will still be sky high since there is more demand than product. So, in light of this, I have been trying to figure out an alternative to this with quite a few available.

This is why I started this thread. I wanted to see if there is any option to boot from the memory stick slot. So far, I have not heard of any. Then, I thought about the USB way of booting and did a little research. As my above post states, there are 4 options in the BIOS to boot from. Our ticket is going to be, yes, the floppy disk drive option.

FLOPPY DISK DRIVE? Yep, my TR2A doesn’t have a built in one. BUT, why does the BIOS have this option? So after reading yesterday, I went home and did a really quick test of this. I changed the BIOS to boot from the floppy disk drive. I put in my 2GB thumb drive and re-booted. What happened?

Instantly, the USB drive light was blinking for about 3 seconds! This means, we have the potential to boot from a USB! Now, since I needed at least 5 hours of sleep, I had to stop further progress. But, I then downloaded and burned a Ubuntu bootable OS image onto a CD to try and install an OS onto this thumb drive to see if I could boot from USB. I ran into issues with the image before I could get anywhere. I don’t know if I will have time this week, but for anyone reading this, give it a try and see if you can actually boot from the USB.

Two reasons this is perfect if it works. One, a 32GB USB thumb drive on Ebay can cost as cheap as $50 vs. $500+ for an SSD. Second, multiple OSs can be used, each having their own “environment” without the need of partitions and hardware installs or software wipes. Third, when traveling with your laptop, if you are pulled aside for further questioning and investigation when leaving countries, the thumb drive slips into your pocket and they have no access to any information (if you set your laptop up to not use any internal hard drive like I will).

Any thoughts, ideas, concerns?

I tried setting the boot the floppy option in the BIOS to the first position, saved it and then I tried booting from 2 USB memory sticks. One stick had Backtrack Linux and the other one had Pendrive Linux on it and neither worked. Also I’m sure these sticks are bootable because they work fine in my other laptops that are able to boot from USB. Too bad, I really wanted this to work on the TR.