Samsung 700Z5C, Win 8, Bios does not recognise USB bootable drive

Hi, my friend bought a new SSD drive to replace is dying HDD. We swaped out the HDD for the SSD and made a bootable USB drive with windows 8 on it. However when we acess the BIOS under boot devices there is no USB drive. There is only windows boot manager, sata cd and the SSD. We have already disabled Fast Boot. Is there anything else we should be doing ? Thanks

 

Do you also need to disable SecureBoot? (I don't know, but sensibly that setting is designed to prevent the computer being booted off removable devices).

John

 

We have the Secure Boot option set to disabled, and in the OS Mode Selection just below it we have it set to UEFI & CMOS. There's still no USB bootable device on the boot priority menu. What should we try next ?

 

Is the flash drive a Sandisk? Someone figured out that these identify themselves as a different type of device and the BIOS doesn't recognise them as bootable USB drives.

If the HDD is still usable then an alternative method is to use the Copy Drive option in Samsung Recovery Solution 6 to copy the HDD to the SSD.

John

 

Hello shay92,

Is your USB formatted as NTFS? I believe with UEFI enabled, it needs to be formatted as FAT32 in order to be booted. You may need to create it manually (as opposed to using the good old MS USB setup creation tool). We had some discussion of that not too long ago. I'm on my phone now, but try googling it.

 

Well he gave up with the boot from usb idea. We just couldnt get the pc to recognise the pen. I believe it was a sony pen. We burned a dvd and tred that way. Even tought it was a hassle to get it to boot. I really dont like this whole UEFI business. Thanks everyone for the help!

 

That's good. It's far better to install from DVD on your model anyway, since it avoids a conflict with the ExpressCache drive that arises when you install from USB. It gave rise to this thread.

 

Seems I was lucky when installing Windows 8.1 using a USB memory stick. Installed to a SSD that had been secured erase before putting in NP700Z5C.

When I transferred ISO to USB I think I used Rufus as vaguely remember using the icon to create from ISO.

Disabled Fastboot, but don't remember if had to press F10 for boot menu, but testing the same USB memory stick now I had to press F10. May be with the completely blank SSD laptop auto booted from USB memory stick originally.

Looking at disk management in Windows I have a 7.46GB Disk1 so that is Express Cache?

This was done after getting BIOS update to P06ABJ.

 

Yes, that's the iSSD used by ExpressCache. Setup for Win7 and Win8 would both (incorrectly) detect this as the boot device when installing from USB on models like yours, requiring some severe workarounds. (Installing from DVD don't have this problem). We have a thread dedicated to that.

If you were able to install 8.1 without problems, that means Microsoft fixed this incorrect detection in 8.1 Setup. That's good news, one less hurdle for Samsung owners - although 8.1 brought plenty others