Bootable Removable Drive

Bootable USB Drive

Here's some information to get your USB drive bootable.

To make a Dos bootable USB drive, the easiest method is using this HP Boot Utility that works on almost all flash drives. You will need the DOS operating system files. You can find a variety of them at bootdisk.com. I use the Windows 98SE Custom, No RAM Drive one.

For making a Linux boot drive, there are some instructions here. Some more information here which seems to be easier.

Bootable CD

What you need:

• Nero burning software (or any software that can make bootable disks)
• USB flash drive formatted in Fat/Fat32. No other drives connected to the system with a Fat/Fat32 partition.
• A blank CD
• A few minutes

Go into the laptop BIOS and enable USB Emulation
Download a Windows 98SE boot image from bootdisk.com.
Extract the files to C:\boot

Open Nero and select CD-ROM (Boot). Under the boot tab, select Image file. Click Browse, and browse to your C:\boot directory. Change the file type to All Files. Check the box labeled Enable expert settings. Set the emulation to Floppy Emulation 1.44MB. Click New.

Insert a blank CD-R or CD-RW. Burn the data to to blank disk. Don't worry about having the contents of the new CD empty. (Some versions of Nero have a bug that resets the expert settings. Go to the Boot tab and make sure they are set properly)

Once your CD has been created, insert it into your laptop drive. Connect your USB flash drive. Boot to the CD. You should be at an A:\ prompt now. Type sys c: and that will transfer the boot files to the USB drive. Now, remove the CD and reboot the computer. Tap on the F12 key and when you see the boot list, select the USB device. You should be able to boot to the USB drive. Enjoy.

*I recommend putting some dos diagnostic files on your flash drive. I recommend putting Ghost, F-Prot for Dos, Ranish Partition Manager, etc.