I want to make my USB Flash Drive Bootable

[herge]

Tuesday. July 11. 2006

Hi All:
I have discovered USB flash drives.
Not only are they small and relatively
inexpensive. They can hold Massive
amounts of data in the size of a Postage
Stamp.
I have a 512 MB one and a 1 GB[Giga Byte].
Is they any way of making them bootable?
The Maxell vendor was not particular helpful?
An email and Phone call to the help line
was not at tall fruitful. IE got no
useful imformation out of them?
Also a bloody waste of time as well
calling the help line.
Also I have an Older USB IE 1.1 NOT 2.0.
My operating System is Windows XP Pro.

Any Suggestions:
I've tried USB.ORG
& Microsoft.com

[P1]

Yes, USB drives ( ram or disk ) are bootable, almost like other removable media.  For instance, you can sys a USB drive, but whether it boots or not, is in hardware.  There are only a few motherboards to support USB booting.

Regards,  P1  :8)

[Casper]

If your USB ports are on the Motherboard, chances are they can be used to boot media.  If your ports are in an expansion card, forget the idea.

Paul

[Tedd]

As long as your BIOS supports booting from a usb device, then there shouldn't be a problem. However, making it do something useful (rather than complaining of an invalid boot-disk/no operating system) is a different matter. Normally they're formatted as FAT16 (unless you reformatted from windows and made it FAT32) so, as long as the disk contains the correct files (in the correct places) to boot an operating system then it should work perfectly.
In short: if your BIOS lets you, and the 'disk' has a valid boot-sector (most likely) and the necessary files are there - yep!
(What would you like to boot into?)

[herge]

Hi Tedd:
What files would I need to boot into Windows XP?
CmD.exe NtlDR Command.com

[Tedd]

I don't know what the exact file list should be, though ntldr is a start. However, ntldr requires a number of other files including whichever ones it gets its settings from and the list of OSes it has the option to load. There should be a tool to create a boot ('rescue') disk... somewhere ::)
The question is - do you want to install winxp onto the usb drive?? Otherwise, why would you want to boot from it into an already valid winxp disk? And in that case, you could try installing winxp onto the usb disk (but don't expect it to fit, or if by some miracle it did then there wouldn't be much space left.)

[Mark Jones]

Check out BARTPE... http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I assume this could be put on USB drive too.

[P1]

Minimum for a NT Boot from a Device.

Code Select Expand

NT Boot Sector
boot.ini
NTDETECT.COM
ntldrThis does not in no way should be understood as being all the necessary files.

With adjustments to the boot.ini, you can point the boot process to any other device/partition with all the other files.

Regards,  P1  :8)

[Casper]

I have BartPE on a USB drive, it works but it took hours to make.  You essentially have to modify your setup installation to include SP2 and then add the BartPE stuff for installing any particular software you need to load at bootup.  This is not a simple task and the first couple of times I tried it, I screwed it up and had to start over.

bbie.exe
bbie.lic
image1.bin
ISO2.nrb
Log.txt

This is also required for booting BartPE along with the XP and SP2 integration file you need to build.  Have fun.

Paul