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. The NEWEST methods are listed last on this page,
starting with Method 6 for Vista/Win7
A FEW THINGS YOU NEED TO CONSIDER IN ADVANCE.
1. The PC has to support booting from a USB flash/pen/key 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. Of course there
are exceptions, perhaps some are covered here.
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 USB Flash Drive Utilities by HP/Compaq.
They work with Most other brands of flash drives as well.
hpflash2.zip HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. Formerly called
hpflash1.zip
HP Drive Key Boot Utility Version 7.41
Download
"I would put a little extra in there." Says a fan who emailed me with
no name:)
For the downloads section I use nLite to make and create the image
file as you can import the service packs and do some tweaking to the
install files.
http://www.nliteos.com/download.html
1. Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and run the program.
2. Select the Device and the File system from the drop down menus
and click start.
3. Close the above program and install and run the HP Drive Key
Boot Utility. Selecting the appropriate drive letter. Click Next.
4.Select the circle on the top that says create New or Replace Existing
Configuration. Click Next.
5. Select the circle labeled Hard Drive. Click Next.
6. Select Create New Filesystem. Click Next.
7. Select the circle labeled HP Firmware Flash Package. Click Next.
Click Finish

Method 3 - Third Party Links

Boot off USB by floppy, CD, or NT boot menu when your computer
doesn't support it
"I use it to boot off of USB by floppy when the computer doesn't
support it - although in this mode it cannot save changes made to the
setup." said Josh.

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).

Method 6 - Don Wrote below, or see this link from Justin:

http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345
bootable USB guide, here we assume that you are using either Vista
or Windows 7 to create a bootable USB.
1. Insert your USB (4GB+ preferable) stick to the system and backup
all the data from the USB as we are going to format the USB to make
it as bootable.
2. Open elevated Command Prompt. To do this, type in CMD in Start
menu search field and hit Ctrl + Shift + Enter. Alternatively, navigate
to Start > All programs >Accessories > right click on Command
Prompt and select run as administrator.
3. When the Command Prompt opens, enter the following command:
DISKPART and hit enter.
LIST DISK and hit enter.
Once you enter the LIST DISK command, it will show the disk
number of your USB drive. In the below image my USB drive disk no
is Disk 1.
4. In this step you need to enter all the below commands one by one
and hit enter. As these commands are self explanatory, you can easily
guess what these commands do.
SELECT DISK 1 (Replace DISK 1 with your disk number)
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT FS=NTFS
(Format process may take few seconds)
ASSIGN
EXIT
Don’t close the command prompt as we need to execute one more
command at the next step. Just minimize it.
5. Insert your Windows DVD in the optical drive and note down the
drive letter of the optical drive and USB media. Here I use “D” as my
optical (DVD) drive letter and “H” as my USB drive letter.
6. Go back to command prompt and execute the following commands:
D:CD BOOT and hit enter. Where “D” is your DVD drive letter.
CD BOOT and hit enter to see the below message.
BOOTSECT.EXE/NT60 H:
(Where “H” is your USB drive letter)
7. Copy Windows DVD contents to USB.
You are done with your bootable USB. You can now use this bootable
USB as bootable DVD on any computer that comes with USB boot
feature (most of the current motherboards support this feature).
Note that this bootable USB guide will not work if you are trying to
make a bootable USB on XP computer.

Method 7 - Suggested by marc: Boot-USB-Stick

While trying to flash my bios I looked at your page. Most methods are
complicated, after a while of browsing the net I found above:
BareBones Boot Floppy And ISO
DOS 7.10 | Readme

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