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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 o
ften also called thumb drives, keychain drives, pendrives, etc. The NEWEST metho
ds 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 an
ywhere 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 U
SB 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 utilitie
s.
5. References to "A:" drive lines in the autoexec.bat and/or config.sys files yo
u 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 th
ese 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 g
o 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 w
here 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 Mo
st other brands of flash drives as well.
hpflash2.zip HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. Formerly called hpflash1.zip
6.2. Use bootsect to set the USB as a bootable NTFS drive prepared for a Vista/7
image. I m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labeled disk G:\ by the co
mputer:
bootsect /nt60 g:
(Where G 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 bootab
le DVD on any computer that comes with USB boot feature (most of the current mot
herboards support this feature).
Note that this bootable USB guide will not work if you are trying to make a boot
able USB on XP computer.