F12 boot menu

A friend has a D150. His boot menu only contains his HD and a Network boot. A bootable USB flash drive and a USB CD drive aren't present. I hope there is a simple answer. Thanks.

 

Are the USB flash drive and the USB CD rom drive plugged in, when you press F12 ?

If they aren't they won't be shown in the F12 Boot Device selection. They will be shown though, as options in the boot priority selection in the Bios setup, reached by pressing F2.
The F12 menu is a "Change the boot device for this boot only" selection, and therefore only shows the bootable devices present at the moment of pressing F12.
On the other hand, the boot priority selection in the Bios setup defines the default boot priority, used when the boot is "unattended", i.e. when not pressing any keys. So if you forinstance define the default boot priority in the Bios setup, to be USB key, USB CDrom, Internal HD, then you don't need to press F12 when you want to boot off a USB key - Just plug it in, and boot. Remove it when you want to boot the normal OS.

 

DutchDK,

Thanks. Yes we did that. First I arranged the boot order in the BIOS, F2. Windows booted instead of the flash drive. Then I tried several bootable flash drives, connected before powering on, and they weren't present in the F12 boot menu. Weird.

 

Can you see the USB devices in the Windows devicemanager, when you have booted to the Windows installation on the internal harddisk ?
If so, just for kicks, try to first boot to windows, then reboot (not shutdown), and select the F12 bootmenu, to see if they then appear.

 

I'll do that but it might be a few days before I see him. I will definitely let you know what happens.

I didn't try the flash drives from his Windows but they boot in my Desktop. The USB CD drive that wasn't seen in the F12 menu works in his Windows.

 

That's odd. I have a 2-week old D150. First thing I did (after making a Windows recovery CD) was to hold down F2 during boot, and enable the F12 option. I was then able to boot from a USB flash drive, and to install Ubuntu on an 8gb SDHC card. To reduce the risk of accidents, I removed the HDD during my Ubuntu experimental installations to flash media. Perhaps this is why the flash memory devices were recognized on the F12 boot menu. It's worth a try. Removing HDD on the D150 is very easy.

 

libssd,

It certainly is odd. I keep thinking it is something I've omitted to do. We tried re-ordering the boot order before I discovered the enable F12 option. Neither works. I'll try some other bootable flash drives but his USB CD drive wasn't in the F12 menu either. From memory, his BIOS is 3.5.

 

I think I have an answer. I tried another, newer USB flash drive. It was seen in the BIOS and booted. The two other flash drivers were old drives and although they don't boot in the Acer, they do boot in other computers including an Asus netbook. The USB CD drive is 10 years old and the Acer doesn't like it either.

At least we know newer flash drives will boot.