Booting from USB HDD

Have a GA-8IPE1000-Pro MB (BIOS F2) with WINXP Pro and am trying to
get it to boot from a USB external HDD without success so far. Firstly
has anyone got this board to boot from a USB HDD? At least that will
tell me it works.

The drive is healthy, that is I can read and write to it from WINXP
and if I boot to DOS using a floppy.

I have wiped the drive using fdisk and formatted it using FAT32 from
my DOS (ver 7.0) floppy and transfered the OS (format /s)

I have made the partition active. Now this was a problem as I tried
to use fdisk to do this but could not as fdisk apparently will only
make drive 1 active whereas this external drive shows as drive 3. I
understand I could make the drive active using gdisk but I don't have
a copy and can't find it on the web. Yes, I know it is bundled with
Ghost but I don't use ghost, use True Image. Anyway I made the drive
active by going to WINXP Control Panel-> Admin Tools-> Computer
Management. It has ooccured to me that maybe the source of the
problem, but I don't know.

In the BIOS, I have set the USB drive to boot first (USB-HDD)

When I try to boot, the machine identifies the drive during boot up
(IBM DJSA 230) but the boot process hangs at ' verifying DMI Pool
Data' after that I get a line 'i.......i....' There is no error
message.

Has anyone any idea what the problem maybe or have any suggestions?

Obviously my work around is to boot from a floppy then access the
drive but I would like to be able to boot directly from the drive (
probably a pride thing ).