Trying to boot from USB and install Windows Server 2008 R2

[Druas]

I'm trying to install Windows Server 2008 on a somewhat old machine just to mess around and gain familiarity. That old BIOS doesn't support booting from USB-HDD, but it does have boot from CD option, so I figured I'd give PLOP a try to circumvent that. Burned the .iso to a DVD and as far as I can tell, it boots up fine. Formatted an 8GB USB drive using Rufus from the same .iso and tried both NTFS and FAT32. Once I select USB in PLOP's menu it comes to a halt. I had Ubuntu 13.04 on it from a couple years ago and as far as I can tell, that was still working fine, but I don't use it. I have never used PLOP before, so I'm not sure exactly what is supposed to happen. I think it starts trying to load drivers when it halts?

Hardware: AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+, 2 GB RAM, 2 WD Raptor hardrives RAID 0 totalling 150GB, Nvidia 7800 GTX graphics card, nForce4 motherboard

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[jraju]

HI, i AM also new to this forum. But hope that this helps you. When you press, if it stops after loading a blue screen, just finding the usb, and then hangs, then it is sure that OS is there , but it is not bootable. Before anything you have to check whether you have a bootable usb in your possession.
                      But if you press the usb and then found no action, then there is some bios issue.
                         If there is os in bootable usb, then this works to load the OS without fail. Is there any error message . Do you see a light blue screen when you press the usb.

[Druas]

I'm pretty sure it's bootable, like I said I used Rufus to do this. I've kind of given up for now because I'm out of ideas. But from what I can remember, no errors, everything just freezes.

[jraju]

hI, did you check with moba live cd, which is very useful to know whether your usb is bootable. Just download mobalive cd a free utility and then run the program  and select the usb menu direct from the appearing menus. That will boot the OS if bootable, If it is running in qemu menu , then to get rid of it , just press crl+alt+2 (above the keyboard) to exit qemu menu. then type exit to your normal windows . You could try in another computer. This is for easy checking whether the OS is bootable.
                                 How did you use the boot manger. What i have done is just download the zip file in the link . Extract all  to a new directory and then copy the plpbt.iso having 544 bytes and then burn the same with imgburn or nero. and then tried . It worked smooth on my computer. It boots from usb without fail. You will see a light blue screen accessing the boot media. If there is bootable media, then it definitely works. If you do not see any thing, then there is bios issue