How to boot an LE1600 from an external drive?

[robcat2075]

I got an LE1600, tablet only, no docking station, no original restore media.

It was restored to a fairly pristine state by the previous owner and I've made an image of the hard drive with an eye to being able to restore that at some future date.

However, the restore software I'm using requires the Computer to boot off an external CD drive so the main hard drive is free to write to and i can't get the LE1600 to recognize a USB CD-ROM drive during boot up. It does recognize a USB keyboard during boot, I used that in the bios to enable booting from a CD ROM.

Can an LE1600 boot from a USB CD drive?

If not, what are my other options for restoring a drive image?

[robcat2075]

update: for some reason it worked once.

I found out that I had been disabling boot-from-CD in the BIOS, and I fixed that. The next time I tried booting it actually spun up the USB CD-ROM and loaded the welcome screen from EaseUS ToDo Backup software from the CD.

But then i was stuck. There was nothing I could do to navigate that screen. The cursor device on the edge of the LE1600 wasn't dong anything.

So I rebooted with my USB keyboard plugged back in and I've never been able to get it to boot off the CD since.

There must be some important magic I've left out. Any ideas?

[robcat2075]

update: I've since discovered that my external CD-ROM (quite an ancient thing) benefits from being turned off and back on before trying to boot the LE1600. It does get recognized and booted from after that maneuver.

[digitaldoctors]

update: I've since discovered that my external CD-ROM (quite an ancient thing) benefits from being turned off and back on before trying to boot the LE1600. It does get recognized and booted from after that maneuver.

Heh. Who knew ?