Ready to 
Make a USB flash drive bootable
Robert Hallock
January 24, 2008 1:00 AM ET in Tech
Installing the applications
The HP tool requires no configuration. Simply press “Yes” or “Install” when prompted, and the application will reside in the “HP System Tools” folder in your start menu.
VFD must be manually extracted to a folder of your choosing. Once you have done that, Navigate to that directory and launch “Vfdwin.exe.”
Once the application is started, press “Install”(1) to install the virtual floppy functionality. Hit “Start”(2) to enable the drive, then switch to the Drive 0 tab(3).
Once there, press the “Change” button (1), set the dropdown (2) to “A:” and then select “Okay” (3). An A: drive will now appear in windows Explorer, and you can exit out of VFD.
Creating your bootable floppy disk
Floppy images that we’ll be putting to disk come in one of two ways.
Firstly, As .IMG, .IMA or .FLP files:
In the case of .IMG/.FLP/.IMA files, VFD has a convenient way of getting these onto the virtual floppy for you. Save the floppy image to a convenient location, then launch a DOS shell (Start -> run -> CMD, [ENTER]). Navigate to the directory that VFD was extracted to, and issue the following command:
VFDWIN A: [path to image]
As you can see, I mounted the DFT32.IMG in C:\ to the A: drive with that command. If I were to navigate to Windows Explorer, I would see that the image has been placed on our virtual floppy drive just as if I had written it to an actual floppy disk.
Or…
Secondly, as executables which prep the floppy disk for you.
In this case, simply let the included installer write it to your virtual floppy for you. These are easy and automatic. But now that we know how to prepare a virtual floppy disk that the HP utility can use, it’s time to follow our eight steps to creating a bootable flash drive!
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