Hiya,
I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s possible to boot from the USB4 ports using USB4 or only using USB 3.2?
If you have a USB4 storage drive that’s bootable, assuming it comes online fast enough for the UEFI to pick it up it should be bootable.
Depending on the drive some can take longer than the UEFI is willing to wait for the probe before booting, but that’s a thing that is most likely to happen with a spinning platter drive adaptor than a solid state device.
Are you trying to boot via USB4 and running into issues, or just theory crafting at this point?
I have a USB4 NVMe enclosure that I was trying to use, unfortunately I accidentally nuked the install on it and have to fix it. I’ll give it another shot after I set it up again.
I have a thunderbolt/usb4 NVME enclosure.
With one cable it appears as a pcie device.
With a different cable it appears as a usb storage device.
On my FW16, it can only boot in usb storage device mode.
So, in my experience, the answer is NO, you cannot boot from a USB4 device on my FW16 AMD laptop.
For those reading this comment, what is likely going on here is that the device has two modes: Thunderbolt and USB. The Thunderbolt mode will be presenting it as an x4 PCIe device, whereas the USB mode will be a converter to a USB storage device. One of the cables does not support Thunderbolt 3 so it reverts to the USB mode.
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So, after attempting to boot Windows 10 to go (created using Rufus) it appears that at very least my specific combination of hardware and software won’t boot over USB4 only USB 3.2. Unfortunate but I’ll live.
I can boot just fine over Thunderbolt/USB4 with both the OWC Express 1M2 enclosure as well as the Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 M.2 enlosure WITH LINUX. Both have the internal drives show up as regular nvme drives as if they were internal, and you can run any command you can for internal drives such as smartctl, the nvme-cli, etc.
Note again though that this is WITH LINUX, and the only change I have to make for everything to work properly is to add thunderbolt.host_reset=0 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub.
I have tried this in the past with Windows with limited success. I think I was able to get it installed by installing Windows on a NVME drive that was internal first, then moving that drive to an enclosure, but IIRC when I went to reboot/shutdown it would get stuck and would randomly crash while trying to use it.