Anyone found an easy way? It seems odd that in 2008 with a newish board you can't simply plug in a bootable pendrive and switch on, as I could with my old Asus board. Seems to affect other Gigabyte boards too
It's a lot of work to actually make it all happen. Booting happens in the BIOS realm and running USB in that environment is tough (the controller tend to be very heavily software driven). Because of living in the BIOS real, things must either be a floppy (drive number 0x00 or 0x01) or a hard drive (drive number 0x80-0x88). Then there needs to be an int 13 handler sand possibly an int 40 handler. These have to be made to mesh with the USB spec's mass storage class, and they don't really line up all that well. It looks like the gigabyte board uses the Award codebase. I think the Asus uses AMI's codebase. AMI's USB code is a bit more refined than the other vendor's USB code at the moment. You can complain to the mainboard manufacturers, and try to complain to the BIOS vendor, but that probably won't get you anywhere. It comes down to a choice made by the manufacturer on the BIOS they use, and what features they will support.
Looks like that is the problem and it's general with Phoenix/Award; jumping into the BIOS menu does work, it's just that you have to be there ready to tap the Boot Menu key. I thought life would be easier these days...
