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Bootable USB Flash Drive

Sunday, 23 October 2005 hardware tutorials usb

Nate explores the unnecessarily complex world of creating a bootable USB drive and shows you how to make it a lot simpler than it may have seemed.

So you just got your new computer from Dell, HP, etc. and for some reason who knows what you need to boot from a boot disk. AHHHH WTF!!! They didn’t install a floppy drive on my computer. That is ok because you have come to the right place. I am going to show you how to turn your USB Flash Drive into a boot disk (they come with many new computers instead of floppy drives)

Get the Stuff

For this tutorial there are some things you will need to have:

  1. USB Flash Drive
  2. HP USB Flash Drive Format Tool (Archive password is “pasta”)
  3. Win98 Boot Disk or the Files
  4. Some of these Programs (makes the disk more useful)

Getting it Ready

After downloading the HP Format Tool install it. Get your boot disk or the downloadable files and copy/extract them to a folder on your HD. Make sure anything on your USB Drive is backed up because we are going to format it…

Make it Bootable

Add Some More Stuff

As is your new boot disk can’t do much other than boot the computer to DOS so you need to add other programs to make it more useful.

Using It

This can be tricky since most older computers do not support booting to USB Devices. You will have to go into the BIOS and play around with the boot sequence trying things like USB ZIP etc. You will have less trouble with newer systems.