I can't boot from usb thumb drive, or a western digital mybook external hard drive.

This is starting to drive me crazy. Neither will boot. It just goes straight into Windows 7 on my other partition. I tried to put both as first boot device in bios, and then tried to do it from the boot menu. No dice.

I have a g31m-es2l I bought yesterday, core 2 duo e8200, 2gb ddr2 800 ram... I don't know what the problem is. It just won't boot from the external drives.

Any help? I am so lost at this point.