Need to make a USB Flash Drive into a boot disk

GargGarg Purveyor of Lincoln Nightmares Icrontian
edited November 2004 in Hardware
So, how can I put the boot stuff on a USB flash disk? My roommate's HD is borked and if I can get it to boot off the USB (the BIOS supposedly allows it) then that would be super-convenient.

When I try to format in Windows, the option to make an MS-DOS startup disk is not available.

Comments

  • FormFactorFormFactor At the core of forgotten
    edited April 2004
    That all depends...

    Which version of windows are you running?
  • GargGarg Purveyor of Lincoln Nightmares Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    XP Pro.

    The problem was actually sidestepped by reinstalling Windows. But I'm still curious how to do it.
  • FormFactorFormFactor At the core of forgotten
    edited April 2004
    double click my computer, right click floppy drive, choose format. Make sure the "create ms dos startup disk" box is checked.

    If it isnt there you may need SP1 installed. I run XP pro on 3 of my machine and the ms-dos boot disk option is available on all of them.
  • TheSmJTheSmJ
    edited April 2004
    FormFactor wrote:
    double click my computer, right click floppy drive, choose format. Make sure the "create ms dos startup disk" box is checked.

    If it isnt there you may need SP1 installed. I run XP pro on 3 of my machine and the ms-dos boot disk option is available on all of them.


    Ok, that's with a floppy. How do you do it with a USB thumb drive?
  • qparadoxqparadox Vancouver, BC
    edited April 2004
    I'd image all you should need are the same files as on a bootable floppy and maybe have to toggle a boot flag. Try just making a boot floppy and then copying to the empty USB pen drive. It just might work.

    If you're feeling adventurous there's several linux distributions you could try, however, depending on what sort of recovery work you need to do this may not work for you: (note NTFS is a proprietary and closed filesystem so there is no write support for it, read support is available and you can write to it if you use the NTFS driver in linux). From places like:
    http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ ,

    you may be able to find some documentation about doing this. What exactly are you trying to accomplish by booting off the pen drive? Do you need to try to do file recovery or what? There's many better ways to do this booting off a cd and then copying the data to the floppy. (for example check out knoppix.net).
  • FormFactorFormFactor At the core of forgotten
    edited April 2004
    TheSmJ wrote:
    Ok, that's with a floppy. How do you do it with a USB thumb drive?


    my bad. I misunderstood the question....

    K why not try formating a floppy for msdos startup. format the thumb drive with fat. copy the contents of the boot floppy to the thumb drive.


    That will prolly work, yes?
  • qparadoxqparadox Vancouver, BC
    edited April 2004
    FormFactor wrote:

    K why not try formating a floppy for msdos startup. format the thumb drive with fat. copy the contents of the boot floppy to the thumb drive.

    Great minds think alike ;).
  • GargGarg Purveyor of Lincoln Nightmares Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    Well I tried that, but it wouldn't boot off the pen drive. Which is weird, because his BIOS (for a Shuttle KT400) has several different options for booting off a pen drive, which we tried. This was basically an attempt to avoid having to move a floppy over to his computer (he doesn't have one) and to avoid having to burn a cd.

    Turned out the file that was borked on his drive that I was going to replace probably isn't replaceable. It's "system," located in the windows/system32/config folder. It won't let you copy it while Windows is running, and although I don't know what that file is, I got the idea that it's something that is determined by each computer and it wouldn't have done any good to copy mine over to his computer.

    Again, a good 'ol Windows reinstall was a pain in the rear, but it worked.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited April 2004
    Boot discs of any sort are generally picky about where certain files are located. If it's not where it's supposed to be it might as well not be there at all.

    I would check out some of the free barebones burning utilities. Many of the simpler programs are not picky about media. If you could make an image of the bootable floppy you might be able to "burn" it to the USB Flash Drive, especially if the USB drive has been assigned a drive letter.

    Or, try this
  • FormFactorFormFactor At the core of forgotten
    edited April 2004
    qparadox wrote:
    Great minds think alike ;).

    :thumbup indeed. i didnt notice u suggested the same thing. I cant imagine why that wouldnt work :scratch:



    must be PCs bios or something.

    I have a similar problem on my lappy. It will not boot with a usb drive plugged in for some reason. Seems BIOS related.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    Your USB drive needs a boot sector and master boot record in addition to the OS files. XP recovery console has a couple of options, namely fixmbr and fixboot, or you could make a DOS boot floppy and include sys.com. If your BIOS sets up the USB drive in DOS mode ("Legacy USB Mode Enabled"), then you can just run sys D: or whatever the drive letter of your USB drive is.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • blue_icemanblue_iceman
    edited April 2004
    I thank you all for your help. It was my pc that was "borked". My luck that day was that I had two comps die on me (so I thought) and the desktop was "surely" the easiest to fix. I had tried messing with the the Win XP restore options and nothing seemed to work. I didn't want to have to reinstall windows again (God that takes forever) so we had the same ideas you had and nothing worked so I just did the quick reinstall and stayed up till 3 am reinstalling most everything, thank God for data loss though. :aol:
  • BarnyBarny
    edited June 2004
    I inadvertantly removed the partition on my flash drive (I was reformatting my harddrive and hit the wrong key) Does anyone know how to reformat a flshdrive this one is useless as it is.
  • BarnyBarny
    edited November 2004
    drasnor wrote:
    Your USB drive needs a boot sector and master boot record in addition to the OS files. XP recovery console has a couple of options, namely fixmbr and fixboot, or you could make a DOS boot floppy and include sys.com. If your BIOS sets up the USB drive in DOS mode ("Legacy USB Mode Enabled"), then you can just run sys D: or whatever the drive letter of your USB drive is.

    -drasnor :fold:
    How do I access the XP recovery consol?
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    Boot from your XP CD with the flash drive installed, then select "Repair Windows XP using the Recovery Console".

    -drasnor :fold:
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