GA-970A-UD3 won't boot from USB

[01BTC10]

My setup:

GA-970A-UD3 rev. 1.1 with latest F5 bios
AMD Athlon II X3
4GB ram
ATI Radeon 5850
ATI Radeon 5870
XFX PRO1250W Gold PSU

I don't need any HDD for my build. The OS is on a live USB stick. The stick is booting without any issue on Asus and MSI motherboard. I tried various Linux distribution but they all failed to boot.

Also tried lot of different bios setting without success. I can flash the bios via the stick so it is detected at some point.

I don't know what to do now. I'm thinking about filling a RMA if I can't find how to boot from USB since the board is useless for my need.

Anyone could suggest what I should try now?

Thank's!

[klh591]

If the USB Device is bootable the only thing you need to do is go into the BIOS and on the Advanced BIOS page,  set the First  Boot Device
to USB-HDD and then SAVE the new BIOS setting and reboot.

I have two 970A-UD3 boards and have booted from a USB thumb drive many times with both boards and numerous operating systems that
I use for diagnostic work.

[01BTC10]

This is the first thing I did.

[MarkJohnson]

try pressing F12 at boot for a boot menu and select the USB drive there.  I think mine was listed under HDDs not usb.  so you may need to set the hdd priority to use USB as first boot device.

Maybe USB software config isn't compatible with this mb or chipset?

If I may ask, what is it you are trying to  boot?
-=Mark=-

[Dark Mantis]

You need to enable Legacy USB Storage or Devices in the BIOS so that there are drivers for it loaded straight away before the OS loads.

[01BTC10]

Legacy USB Storage is enabled by default. I tried F12 with all available options. I think the board is defective.

[01BTC10]

If I may ask, what is it you are trying to  boot?
-=Mark=-

This is a mining rig for Bitcoins. I tried to run BAMT, a Debian variant. I also tried Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu Server and Katana toolkit.

This is the first time in my life I can't boot from USB and I did before on various computer.

[01BTC10]

My BIOS is too strict about compatible MBR. I found this:

GB's BIOS will only boot USBs formatted to FAT-32, conforming to normal MBR bootloader. I've seen this before, and surmised that the 'stick-maker' was formatting in ReiserFile, or one of the EXT 'flavors', but no one ever followed up to confirm or deny... Also, if it's putting the bootloader into its own partition - won't work!

In the BIOS, on the "Integrated Peripherals" page, the "USB Storage Function" item must be enabled (which should be the default) to allow USB booting...

I've put a little work into a 'GB USB booting tutorial', and frankly, I'd just go ahead and finish it up for you, but I really don't want to reboot the several times it will take me to 'firm up' procedural details, and take the BIOS/boot pictures for the post - just noticed VAIL finally went 'public beta', so will be downloading for likely twenty-six hours or so  There's likely enough there to test a 'raw DOS boot', just to see if your hardware (especially the USB stick itself) will do it...

Fixed. Here is a brief summary. Since my ubuntu live usb sticks (2gb kingston and 8gb sandisk sd/usb reader - fat32, created in ubuntu 10.04) would not boot this board even though they would boot my ga-ep45-ud3p, I decided to try bilbat's suggestion with the HP usb boot program. I created the win98 boot disk on the kingston 2gb stick without reformatting. It booted right up. Next, I used windows version of unetbootin to write the ubuntu live cd to the kingston disk. This fired right up and completed the install.

My USB stick now appear as a HDD. It still doesn't boot but now I know what is the problem.

[01BTC10]

I found the problem is because my BIOS is very strict about MBR compatibility. Now I can boot in DOS mode. The flash drive need to be formated as a Win98 Startup disk using HP USB disk storage format tools. Unetbootin menu is booting from USB but won't install BAMT.

If I use Windows or Linux diskimager it is deleting the good MBR. I tried converting BAMT  .img to .iso and it is not booting with Unetbootin.

Is it possible to boot BAMT(Debian Linux) from a Win98 DOS command prompt? Maybe there is a way to burn the image and keep the working MBR?

If the working MBR is deleted, the flash drive is not recognized at all by the BIOS.

[MarkJohnson]

Are you sure it's compatible with this mb and chipset?  If it is a stand alone application type program you may just have hardware compatibility issues.

Can you see the usb drive in the BIOS at all?  can you select it to boot? Does it try to boot at all?  What errors do you get?

-=Mark=-

[z3r0_k00l75]

Just use Plop Boot Manager as I am doing. This is obviously a defect in the bios of the 970a-ud3 that the devs are not going to address. I think it is a bit ridiculous that when confronted with this bug we as users are told to do this, reformat that, then make sure to do this and that and the other then hope and pray that your USB thumbdrive will boot. I have a closet full of motherboards from 2000 on that have no problem at all booting from a flash drive. Its just this board. This one motherboard that has a well documented history of NOT booting from a usb flashdrive at all unless a handful of esoteric steps are taken. To whomever it is responsible for writing the bios for this board - Just fix the bios already so those of us not using optical drives can get on with our lives.

[Vezina]

Some USB sticks don t boot.
It is not necessary a motherboard issue.
Try formating the stick with HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.
Try different sticks.
The board boots linux as i ve used some Live CD Antivirus Linux distroes from BitDefender and Kaspersky to scan my PC and it booted them just fine.

[orivej]

Same issue with the same board, but different distribution.  Circumvented by adding plopKexec to the already existing GRUB 2 menu.  Thank you, z3r0_k00l75, for suggesting Plop!

Edit: upgrading BIOS from 6 to 8a allows system to detect and boot from USB drive.

[lightman]

Hello
I post here because I solved the USB BOOT problem (at least in rev 1.4)

first: I tried flashing to the last version F12c (beta) since it was no good, go back to F11, still no boot
Tried plop, as soon as i selected the USB boot drive it freezes, and nothing happens.
Tried to format with HP tool, but no good because as soon as I install linux, it happens again.
Tried like 6 different sizes and brands of flash drives (from 8 to 32 GB) none of them boot.

It is easy to see if they will boot or not, when boot, press F12, then select +HARD DRIVE, if in the next screen, you see your drive, then it will boot.

By accident, I test an old Hiren's boot USB (2GB) and it DID boot!! WOW, we got something here!.

So I start playing and the issue is WHEN the drive is bigger than 4GB.
so, I fdisk MY problematic 8GB Kingston G3, delete partition, then create a partition but of 3980MB (less than 4GB) and set type to FAT32 (d).
then go to the normal install process of ubuntu and it WORKS.

now I can boot ubuntu 12.04 LTS with gigabyte.
Yes, I have half the capacity but that's not important in my case, 4GB is plenty
hope it helps someone, so i doesn't have to lost all day trying to figure it out like i did.

light

[Queensney]

I had the same issue with my Windows 10 computer a few days ago. And got it fixed with this boot guide. Which tells you the exact steps to boot from USB