USB boot drive

Booting a computer is most of the time a seamless task. However, bypassing the default OS is sometimes required in order to perform maintainance operations. To do so, resourcing to a boot disk is the common way to go. However, most modern laptops don't come with floppy drives at all! Thus, booting from a CD or from a USB pen drive seems like the obvious approach. Nevertheless, since ME that the MS OSes don't recognize the

> format X: /S

command, thus it becomes hard to create a DOS bootable CD or pen drive. Hopefully, this wiki will help you to create quickly a DOS bootable usb pen drive.

How-To

This is a How-To to create a bootable DOS USB drive.

Prerequisites

• A windows 98 bootable floppy disk image (here),
• Windows-based Format Utility for HP Drive Key or DiskOnKey USB Device,

Procedure

• Plug in an empty USB pen drive (move previously its content to a safe place);
• Extract the win98 boot disk's files to a folder;
• Run the HP format utility;
• From the menu
  • select the USB pen drive,
  • select the FAT(32) filesystem,
  • check the Create a DOS startup disk option,
  • and assign the folder the containing the win98 boot disk's files;
• Format the USB pen drive;
• And Voilá!

NOTE: You can get your own boot disk image for other MS OSes here. You will also require the WinImage tool and this How-To.

External References

• HP Drive Key or DiskOnKey USB Device,
• WinImage,
• Windows boot disk images,
• Tutorial from NightOwl that inspired this article.