question about setting boot order

I tried to set the boot order to boot first from USB but when I go to the setup screen and go to set the boot oder, USB is not available.
I have four optins:
Hard Drive Group
CD Group (or soemthing like that)
floppy group and down below it says - not installled
Network boot gorup - and down below it say s- not installed not installed

Is there soemthing else I need to change so that USB is availiable. I can boot from USB by going to the boot menu and selecting - but how can I select usb as first boot. I am pretty sure I did it on the other computer.
BIOS is - American Megatrends.

Thanks,
Fay

Hi Fay,
this link to the How To Geek gives directions on how to set boot preference to usb when not included in bios setup
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16822/boot-from-a-usb-drive-even-if-your-bios-wont-let-you/
Goof

Goofrey, Thanks for our reply.

My computer is new just a few months old - couldn't believe there would not be some way of setting it to boot by USB in the BIOS.

I went back and played with it some more. Here is what I found.

If I have a bootable USB drive in one of the USB ports before I go into BIOS, the drive showed up under CD ROM Group. So, I selected CD Rom group and set the flash drive to be the first and the dvd to be the 2nd. It did not work.

I went to boot menu instead of setup mentu, the flash drive appeared twice. If I selected the bottom entry, it did not work. If I selected the top entry it did.

I went back into bios and did some more looking. I discovered that if the flash drive was inserted when I went to setup, it was not only part of the CD Rom group but part of the Hard drive group as well. I selected the hard drive group and then selected the flash drive to be first, and the hard drive 2nd. That did work, it booted from the flash drive.

SO, with the flash drive inserted, if I go to the boot menu, it shows up twice, the bottom entry does not work, the top one does.

If the flash drive is inserted when I went to the setup menu, it showed up as both part of the CD rom group and the Hard drive group. Selecting it first under the CD rom group did not work. Selecting it first under the Hard drive group did.

Does think make sense to any one? Is it just a quirk of this particular bios?
Since doing it this way shows the actual flash drive, I wonder if it would work with another drive or I would have to go to bios and reset if I wanted to use a different drive. I don't have another bootable usb drive to try that out.


Fay