[rossmission]

hi could any one tell me how i can change my bios to boot usb flash drive on start up

because i am using bitlocker and i have saved the stuff to usb for bitlocker and when i restart it gives me a bitlocker error saying that it couldnt boot files from the usb or somthing

any help plz ?

[groffg]

I think you misunderstand BitLocker's operation. BitLocker doesn't boot from a USB flash memory device; it boots from the system volume (on the hard disk) and reads the USB key for the machine-generated password required to continue the boot sequence and decrypt the operating system volume. The boot sequence (specified in the BIOS) should be set to boot to the HDD first (or, at any rate, to boot to the HDD before booting to a USB device).

Note: for BitLocker to work, it's necessary to have a sufficiently updated BIOS that "understands" how to read from a USB drive, to make a long story short. I believe the BitLocker Drive Prep Tool checks for this (or maybe BitLocker itself checks for this upon first being enabled, I don't recall). It does this (unless the processed is skipped by the user) before encrypting the operating system volume (the pre-SP1 release of Vista supports encrypting the OS volume only using the control panel applet).

I wrote this in a hurry, so hopefully I didn't omit any pivotal details.

[rossmission]

hi thanks for your reply..

i have updated my bios to the latest version but it still won't work

i was wondering if any one had any idears how to fix this

this is the error message i get.

[groffg]

Well, it's possible that you won't be able to use BitLocker if your computer's BIOS does not support reading from USB drives prior to loading the OS. I'm assuming your motherboard doesn't have a TPM chip, else you'd be using that instead anyway.

So, your options are:
* Find a different FDE provider other than BitLocker (PGP WDE, WinMagic, etc)
* Drop the idea of using FDE entirely. I admit that this isn't as secure, but a reasonable level of security (I assume that's your concern) can be afforded by EFS, TrueCrypt, etc.