Boot from USB

[Alscott101]

First of all Hi to all and I hope someone can help, it would be much appreciated.

Ive got a sony vaio VGN-N21S/W dual bootted with windows 7 and 8. Im trying to install the newer version of 8 but my optical drive refuses to work at boot up. Tried with an original windows 7 disc and 9 times out of ten it wont read this disc either at bootup which is strange as it seems fine when reading discs from within windows. So I made a bootable USB pen drive with 8 on it and set the bios boot order to USB flash first and tried with External drive boot enabled and disabled with no joy. So is it possable to boot from USB or not?.

If not is there another way of installing windows 8 on another partition from within windows 7 as when I tried it gave me no option to install to another partition so I assumed it would install over windows 7 which I dont want.

Thanks in advance for any help

Message was edited by: Alscott101

[KatherineYH · Accepted solution]

Sounds strange... do you have the option of hit "f12" or some other key for a boot menu? and it's gone from there? Can you enter the BIOS and change first boot device? 

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Life is too serious to be taken seriously

Copy/pasted from http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/75652-20-boot-bios

Message was edited by: rich912

edited to provide source of copy/pasted answer from another forum.

[Alscott101]

Changing the first boot device in the BIOS had no effect when trying to install windows from USB for me, but I found the "Boot Menu" by pressing the ESC key whilst booting up. From here I could select USB and windows 8 installed from my USB pen drive.

Thanks Katherine YH for pointing me in the right direction, I never knew there was a boot menu.

[Ourtechguy]

Go to the BIOS

Check secure boot is set to off

Change boot settings from UEFI to legacy

www.ourtechguy.co.uk

[oldrepairman]

The (2009) Sony VAIO VGN-AR51J does not support UEFI.

Use Esc to enter Setup and under Advanced you can enable boot from external device. In the boot list note that external devices are marked with an asterisk.

I have noticed that I have to do this again to boot from USB as it seems to revert back to the more secure (disabled) option.