Written on July 17, 2010 at 1:53 pm by Bhavyesh

Boot from USB device even if not supported by the BIOS

Filed under Computer tricks, Featured, Free Softwares {no comments}

Many old computer systems with outdated BIOS programs does not allow user to boot from USB devices. This prevents them to run any Live operating system.Plop Boot Manager is a perfect tool to overcome this problem. Using this tool you can boot from your External Hard disk or Pen Drive or CD-ROM device even if it is not supported by your BIOS.

Features:

USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI)
CD/DVD boot without BIOS support (IDE)
Floppy boot
Different profiles for operating systems
Define up to 16 partitions
No extra partition for the boot manager
Hidden boot, maybe you have a rescue system installed and the user should not see that there is another system installed
Boot countdown
Hide partitions
Password protection for the computer and the boot manager setup
Backup of partition table data
Textmode user interface 80×50
Graphic user interface 640×480, 800×600, 1024×786, 1280×1024
MBR partition table edit
Start of the boot manager from harddisk, floppy, USB, CD, DVD
Starting from Windows boot menu
Starting from LILO, GRUB, Syslinux, Isolinux, Pxelinux (network)
It can be used as PCI option ROM
Access the whole USB hard disk (up to 2TB) even when the bios has a 128 GiB limit
PCMCIA (CardBus) USB comes with the next release
The boot manager is freeware

This tool is little complicated to use and is meant for advanced computer users only. You may end up screwing your PC if don’t use it with care. So you better use it only if you know how to handle this kind of troubles. I have tested this tool and it worked perfectly for me. You can download Plop Boot Manager from the link given below.