How to boot to alternate devices with win 10?

[zombie67]

I need to boot from a USB device, either flash drive or CD.

No matter what I do in the BIOS to select these alternate devices, win10 on the SATA drive always takes over and boots. I have tried every option in the bios, selected alternate targets using the function keys during boot, and googled every question I can think of.

I never had this problem with XP or win7. It appears that win10 just refuses to let boot happen from any other device somehow. I did find one similar question, where the answer was "you just need to disable Secure Boot and enable Legacy booting in the BIOS." Nothing in the BIOS that looked like that, but I tried flipping every option in the bios that was even remotely associated with booting.

I have the same problem on both of my win 10 machines, with different mobo manufacturers.

Any ideas?

[Bryan]

Z unless I'm mistaken Win10 forces UEFI. In Win7 it was optional. They consider the not being able to boot from a USB device as a security feature. It keeps someone from walking up to your computer, shoving in a USB drive, and then booting your machine. If they do that then they can get to your HDDs.

As the machine is booting you should be able to go into BIOS and choose to boot off of the USB device. It has to be done manually every time you boot.

I ran into that on my I7 machines. I called ASUS and talked to tech support to find out how to get around it. They said there was no way to defeat the UEFI feature in their BIOS.

[Fire$torm]

This whole UEFI thing is M$ doing. They wish to dissuade their user base from booting any OS other then M$ware.

Welcome to the New World Order.....

[Shandia]

If....this really is a Windows 10 feature, there is only one way I can think of to do it. Add in another HD and tell the bios to use it in the boot device catagory. It should pick up that there is NO OS installed and allow cd or usb device boot.

[Fire$torm]

UEFI was a back end "Standard" supported by M$. The PC industry wanted to replace the original BIOS with something that was more secure and have a UI that was more user friendly (aka Point-And-Click). It was M$ that pushed for the boot lock behavior. M$ original proposal had them as a certification agent for ALL future OS releases, regardless of the developer. When UEFI came to market on PC's, the open source community put up a big fight to have the standard amended, removing the certification requirement. They won that fight but we are still left with this "Feature" of UEFI.

[Fire$torm]

Z, I'm just guessing on this but there might be a way to have your PC set up for dual booting using Grub as the boot manager. It would require editing Grub to default to the Windows partition if the Linux partition cannot be found.

I'd suggest talking to Mumps, Slicker and/or any other Linux guru on the team.

[Shandia]

UEFI was a back end "Standard" supported by M$. The PC industry wanted to replace the original BIOS with something that was more secure and have a UI that was more user friendly (aka Point-And-Click). It was M$ that pushed for the boot lock behavior. M$ original proposal had them as a certification agent for ALL future OS releases, regardless of the developer. When UEFI came to market on PC's, the open source community put up a big fight to have the standard amended, removing the certification requirement. They won that fight but we are still left with this "Feature" of UEFI.

I can see this being extremely useful....for those who wish to secure their computer. Much like a case intrusion alarm. We all should know/remember how well that went over. (thinking back to gateway computers) If I was a normal pc user and had a pc for a business, I would love to have a feature such as that. As a tech, I would be taking a hammer to any computer that locked me out of the bios, the settings, and had no way to get past what was set. I'm very thankful my computers don't give me any lip about what to boot and when. I have 10 on all of them again. I also mainly boot to 8.1 and have the drives set to.....IF the bios is reset, that the 8.1 drive is the default drive. With Bipolar, it was a no brainier since she can't remember shit when I turn the power strip off. Now that I think about it, wasn't Dell one of those to embrace this tech years ago? Locking users out if the hard drive died???? lol

[Shandia]

This is a good read. It also shows how M$ has attempted to corner the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot_ criticism
I've never really read up on this before since it rarely ever applied to me.

[John P. Myers]

Still Win10 free and proud

[zombie67]

Whelp, I just bought this C2D with win7 64 pro and 4gb (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5YV22N3278) for $90. I'll use it to run my disk utility on my huge stack of HDs and SSDs.