How To Boot From A USB Flash Drive

For starters this is still a new science and many people have had good luck with at least one of these
methods and others have not. Note that flash drives are often also called thumb drives, keychain drives,
pendrives, etc.

A FEW THINGS YOU NEED TO CONSIDER IN ADVANCE.

1. The PC has to support booting from a USB flash drive. There may be anywhere from 1-3 items to
change in the BIOS to make this possible assuming your BIOS supports it. Some bios's may refer to your
flash drive as a USB floppy or USB zip.
2. The USB flash drive must support booting from it in general.
3. The flash drive must contain the boot/system files.
4. The flash drive must have bootsector area. This is done with special utilities.
5. References to "A:" drive lines in the autoexec.bat and/or config.sys files you copy to the drive after you
make it bootable may result in errors.
6. You "may" have to format your floppy disk first in WinXP before you create a bootdisk as XP may
"not" like working later on with a disk formatted otherwise.
7. Included below is a bootable ISO of DOS 7.1 which may be used with some of these methods if you do
not have a 1.44 drive.

METHODS

Method 1 - Make your flash drive bootable using Bart's mkbt util:
http://www.nu2.nu/mkbt/ | Alt: mkbt20.zip

Put a bootable floppy disk in your A: drive or create one using Windows.
Download mkbt20.zip and unpack to to new temp folder you create.
Go to the temp folder.
Extract the bootsector from the bootable floppy disk. eg Open a DOS Window and go to the directory
where you extracted MKBT. Type:

mkbt -c a: bootsect.bin

The boot sectors from the bootable floppy disk have just been saved to a file in the temp folder you
created.

Format the flash drive in FAT or FAT16.

Copy the bootsector to the flash drive. Open a DOS Window and go to the folder where you extracted
MKBT. Type:

mkbt -x bootsect.bin Z:
"Z" represents the flash drive drive Letter. So if your flash drive has another drive letter, then change the
"Z" accordingly.

Now you can [grin] "should" be able to copy the utils you need to the pen drive.

Method 2 - Try these 2 HP/Compaq USB Flash Drive Utilities. They work with many other brands of
flash drives as well.

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool Version 2.0.6

HP Drive Key Boot Utility Version 7.41

Download

Method 3 - Third Party Links

http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~shaher/Bootable_USB.html

Recall I did say it's a new science.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

Method 4 - A Bootdisk.Com Visitor Suggested

Here is my another method for creating dos bootable USB sticks using windows format.

1. From Win98 DOS-Prompt type "SYS {USBDriveLetter}:" or "FORMAT {USBDriveLetter} /U /S". If

from WinXp then from start->run command.com execute format.exe copied from win95 or win98.

OR

2. Simply by enabling copy system files in windows explorer format window. By default it is disabled for
non-floppy drives. To enable it use windows enabler program from
http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/speedload/Enabler.htm an whoila it works.

Method 5 - Another Bootdisk.Com Fan Suggested - Thanks Keith

First if you don't have a physical floppy drive (and don't want one) you can use the [free] "virtual floppy
driver" from here:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

With that you get an A: drive and can manipulate a floppy image as if you were using real floppy. You can
then use that image to make a bootable CD. It's not that user friendly but once you get how it works it
does work perfectly.

Even cooler you can use a "raw write" utility like dd for windows to write the floppy image directly to
your USB thumb drive. Even without that famous HP utility to do the magic this will make your USB
thumb drive bootable. The 'dd' ported to Windows is located here:

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

Another trick you can use with that dd utility involves MS VritualPC (which is free). You can create a
virtual machine/virtual hard drive, set it up the way you want then use dd to "raw write" the virtual hard
drive image to the thumb drive; this will make the thumb drive identical to the image, including bootable
(again, no HP utilities required).

Of course, your thumb drive will effectively have the capacity the size if the image in question (your 1GB
flash drive will effectively be 1.44 Megs).

BareBones Boot Floppy And ISO

DOS 7.10 | Readme

Bootdisks - PC Support - Essential Utilities Bootdisk.Com