Booting from PCIE USB 3.0 Expansion Card

Question

I just bought a PCIE Expansion Card for USB 3.0 support. It works pretty well inside Windows. However, I did not managed to get my USB 3.0 thumbdrive booted-up (which is connected to the expansion card) as there is no option to choose from the boot menu. So I am just wondering if there is any method to boot up my USB 3.0 devices? Is there any boot up software that extends the support of USB 3.0 expansion cards? E.g. something like Plop Boot Manager 5.0? Or, is it possible to develop one?

My expansion card is Transcend PDU3 http://www.transcend-info.com/products/catlist.asp?ModNo=291&Func1No=1

Thanks!

Answer 1

Booting from an expansion card (whether it be a PCIE SATA card, a PCI network card, or a PCIE USB card) works differently than booting from onboard devices. The card itself must support booting, via its own boot ROM. On some expansion cards, the boot ROM chip is optional and may not be present; other cards are incapable of having a boot ROM.

I couldn't find info online about whether your specific card has a boot ROM on it.

It looks like Plop Boot Manager doesn't currently support USB 3.0, though they plan to soon. It doesn't hurt to try. If you're booting Linux, plopKexec has experimental support for xHCI.

If you're feeling adventurous, you can try this procedure to try to dump the expansion ROM (if any) from your card, and run strings or xxd on it to see if there's any boot code there.