It has always been a hassle to boot the system from other than the already installed hard drive or the CD ROM. With the latest hardware and software improvements, some of the old hardware like motherboards don’t support booting from the modern hardware like the USB drives. PLoP is a software which can boot the system with which ever way you want. It can boot from hard drive, floppy, CD/DVD or even from USB drives.
The good thing about PLoP is that it doesn’t require complex configurations or separate partitions. It just needs to be installed and run. Download the software from the following location:
Features:
* CDROM boot without BIOS support
* USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI)
* 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, CDROM
* Starting from Windows boot menu
* Starting from LILO, GRUB, Syslinux, Isolinux, Pxelinux (network)
* The boot manager is freeware
Leonardo
It didn’t work for me. It just says loading UHCI, OHCI, EHCI drivers and then, “drivers not found”. Then it returns to the boot menu.
Maybe my motherboard is too hard to it.
Bunnyboi
Leonardo, PLoP doesn’t work if you are trying to boot from a device connected to a USB Hub.
Sjur Even Aunmo
Tried to do a full install on an old Fujitsu Lifebook S-series (~2000AD). The install-com-file generates a windows error box about the program trying to access the hard drive directly through some 16bit sub-system, and I’m brought back to the main program list again.
Sjur Even Aunmo
And by the way; I’m running WinXPSp3