How To: Boot from USB drive even if your BIOS won't let you

This post is a continuation from my post about How To: Easy CentOS 6.3 installation using USB thumb drive

After I finished setting up the USB thumb drive, one of the machine that I'm going to install did not allow me to boot from USB, because the BIOS did not support that capability.

As I'm not going to burn the CentOS 6.3 Installer ISO into a CD-RW, just for this machine, I searched the Internet to find solution to this problem. And I found it.

The solution is called plopKexec. This software, when you boot from the CD drive, will search if there are any USB drive attached to the system, and will try to load the Linux bootloader from that drive.

How to use it:

1. Visit the URL http://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec.html
2. Click on Download
3. Dowload the plopkexec.iso file
4. Burn the ISO file into CD-R or CD-RW

 On the computer that you want to install using USB drive

1. Plug in your USB drive into any USB port
2. Put the plopkexec CD into the CD drive
3. Power on your computer
4. The CD will boot, an the menu from your USB thumb drive will shown
5. Select "Install or upgrade an existing system" and continue installing CentOS 6.3 as normal

Here's the screenshot of plopkexec loading the GRUB menu from my USB thumb drive

That's it.

Simple way to solve your USB booting issue :)

Please leave comment if this solution have helped you.

Thanks.