Paul,

Is this a "legacy" BIOS or a "UEFI with CSM" BIOS ?

I get the feeling its legacy, as I did not see any entries indicating UEFI.
On the other hand, it does not show which BIOS it uses either (other than
"revision A08" - below a big DELL logo).

When you Google the model number of the machine,
is the machine known for its "quirks".

I already googled for the specific machine (dell inspiron 6000) together
with keywords for the problem (USB boot), but did not get anything back in
that regard. Not even posts about other people having the same problem.

What is the history of the hard drive ? Has
it always been a Legacy MSDOS partitioned
disk ?

That I cannot be sure (the machine was gifted to me), but it has always been
an XP machine. In other words, not much chance of the HD ever been
formatted with anything else than FAT32 or NTFS.

As for cleaning the HD itself ? Any "strange stuff" on there *should* have
been orphaned by me repartitioning (and subsequent reformatting the
partitions). If any remainder of other filesystems are picked up it
cannot (or should not) be happening thru the new MBR.


I just now also (temporarily) replaced the HD with another old one I had
laying around (and had previously set up as a replacment of - what I thought
at the time - a dying drive). The boot process worked normally on its own,
but again failed when I tried booting after having an empty USB stick
inserted . I think that that pretty-much rules out the origional HD as
the cause of the problems.

In short, it looks like I've bumped into some kind of BIOS problem. Though
why I can't find it using google is beyond me.

Luckily I now know how to recover from and circumvent it. Not the absolute
best result, but not bad either. :-)

Regards,
Rudy Wieser