Making a USB Bootable Disc

Now days with the Trend of using flash drives also called a thumb drives, many are not aware of how these devices can be used as Bootable devices instead of DVD's and CD's now days. Below are very simple steps how you can create USB bootable disc.

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/

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