C30: Booting from external USB hard drive

I carry my OS on an external portable USB drive, and then make use of whatever hardware is available where I visit.
I recently attempted to boot a Lenovo C30 Thinkstation with this external drive, and was unable to do so.  In looking at the BIOS settings, there is no option to boot from USB (other than floppy(?!?) or memory stick).
Is it possible to boot from an external USB hard drive, and if not, why?
jerry

The boot sequence section of our setup menus has been troublesome to say the least (at least through the development phase).  There are various reasons why it is the way it is now....from spec requirements to customer requirements.  So long story short it really needs to be this way, even though situations like the one you encoutered is inconvenient. 
The USB issue is actually done for security reasons.  For example, many large customers don't want users to have the ability to just walk up and plug in a USB device and allow the system to detect that and attempt to boot to it right away as it is a risk to their image/security.  For this reason, USB devices don't automatically get added to the boot order, and must be added throught he setup menu if needed.

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