HOW TO BOOT FROM A USB FLASH DRIVE
"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.
Method/s # 1-Try these 2 USB Flash Drive Utilities by:
HP_USB_Boot_Utility.zip - 4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download
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/s # 2 -
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 “G” as my USB drive letter.
6. Go back to command prompt and execute the following commands:
6.1. Change directory to the DVD’s boot directory where bootsect lives:
d:
cd d:\boot
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 computer:
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 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.
How To Boot From A USB Flash Drive
Originally Posted by Sempron Guy
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