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Boot from USB using GRUB

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026278408 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

My friend's laptop was in a car accident (he's fine!). However the laptop is very old its an Acer Aspire 1520 the CD-rom drive is broken and there is no floppy drive. I made him a USB boot before I took a look at it and found that his BIOS cannot boot from USB. The only thing I have is a GRUB console but he is keen to just install XP (on USB) and use it just for Movies. Is it possible using the GRUB console to get access to the USB and start the windows install? It's a tall order but I think this may be the way, or trying to install via LAN which I don't think will be achievable.

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Fix for: Boot from USB using GRUB

Low Risk

Here is a quick example of grub commands that might just work, explanations and caveats below. Most likely for post-2010 installs. Most likely for pre-2005 installs. For the 2005-2010 period, your guess is as good as mine, but if you use the command for the wrong version, you only get a harmless syntax error on the first command. Choosing the right root At startup, grub will probe for your devices and assign numbers to them. All devices that are partitioned (hard disks and flash drives) will al…

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