How do you explain this ?

I have a 6+ years old Dell Inspiron 1420, 2GB Ram, 110 GB hard drive.
It has, count them, not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 USB ports.
Guess what. Boot setup has 3 options:
Internal hard drive.
CD/DVD
NIC

No USB option to boot from ?
Why is that ?

Just for the hell of it, I selected boot from CD/DVD > then inserted my Sandisk with an OS in it.
Not a chance.

Same OS in a DVD will boot, no problem.

OldMike65 said:

I have 3 HP desktops David, only one of them will boot from a USB drive, the newest one. (only 2 years old)The other two only boot from the dvd drive, each one has SIX usb ports. No option in bios to select their usb ports. This seems to be common in older computers. These two are about 8 to 9 years old.

Thank you.

Maybe that's why.

MrNeeds said:

American Megatrends BIOS by any chance?

Sorry, I do not know what is American Megatrends BIOS.

rvbfan said:

It is a company that writes the BIOS for some motherboard manufacturers.

I don't find that name anywhere in my bios.

OK.
Went to F2 > Boot Sequence > there are 4 on the list........................

1. CD/DVD/CR-RW Drive
2. Diskette Drive
3. Internal HDD
4.USB Storage Device
Onboard NIC

I tried #4. The screen stayed black with a flashing prompt at top left corner. Stayed that way for a LONG time and nothing came of it.
I aborted the attempt.

davidhk said:

OK.
Went to F2 > Boot Sequence > there are 4 on the list........................

1. CD/DVD/CR-RW Drive
2. Diskette Drive
3. Internal HDD
4.USB Storage Device
Onboard NIC

I tried #4. The screen stayed black with a flashing prompt at top left corner. Stayed that way for a LONG time and nothing came of it.
I aborted the attempt.

Don't bother.
Thank you all for trying to help.

I'll just use the dvd.