A Little Background
On all modern Dell computers pushing the F12 on BIOS during boot will allow for a screen that lets you choose what boot option you need. For example if I want to boot off of a USB flash drive to boot into a live Linux distribution in order to clean virus’s on netbooks that do not have CD drives to boot from I would push F12 and choose USB device from the list of options. If this does not show up then I can always go to the F2 bios setup and choose flash drive to be the first option. When I restart the computer it will boot into the flash device.
I understand that I can purchase an external USB CD drive and then boot from that. I do not want to use that option.
The reason for using a flash device instead of a CD is:
- This USB flash device has several different boot OS's on it that are used.
- The antivirus disks are updated often and burning cd's and throwing away others is wasteful compared to simply updating a flash drive.
There is nothing wrong with the flash drive. It works perfect on many other PCs.
Problem
Booting this flashdrive has been working for years on hundreds of computers but I just have this one computer that I cannot figure out how to get it to boot on. I have a Sony Vaio that will not boot to this device.
I’ve tried pushing every key combo I can think of (F12, ESC, DEL, F10…) and none of these key combinations will bring up the boot menu.
I chose F2 and went into the BIOS and changed the first boot device to USB flash device. This did not work either. There is an asterix next to the device and the note states:
This Drive is available when External Device Boot is Enable.
What I Need
- I need to know how to enable “External Device Boot” on the Sony Vaio VGN-NR260E laptop.
- Or I need to know how to bring up the boot menu to allow me to boot off a flash device.
Best Answer
To enable External Device Boot, from Sony Support :