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How to Make a USB Drive Bootable in 5 Minutes
Prepared by Ian Matthews
April 23 2007 - Updated July 1 2007
There are many ways to make external
devices bootable.
USB/Flash/Pen/Thumb/Memory Sticks and even real external hard drives
are now commonly used as boot devices. The process detailed
below can be understood and successfully completed by anyone with
basic knowledge of DOS disk commands.
The most famous and easiest to use
USB boot software is a free Hewlet Packard tool but the most we could get it to do was make
our 4GB USB drive function as a 1.44MB floppy. That's
encouraging
but not very useful. You can download this utility from
HERE.
Then there are special utilities
combined with Windows tools as explained on pages like
THIS one. We did not have much success with this process
either.
There are even a few tools you can
buy, like
THIS one, but again, we did not have as much success.
For us, after many hours of
testing, the easiest way we made our USB flash Drive bootable was:
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PREAMBLE: Make sure your PC supports
booting from a USB flash drive. You have to check with
your manufacturer to verify this but as a rule anything produced
in 2006 or later likely has this functionality.
-
BOOT DISK: Make a standard Windows
floppy boot
disk using whatever version of Windows you have or download one
HERE. You will also need to copy FDISK
and FORMAT to that boot
floppy, which if you can not find on your PC, you can download
for free
HERE.
-
FORMAT: Partition and
Format your USB drive using whatever version of Windows or DOS you
have.
-
BIOS CHANGE: Boot your PC into the BIOS
setup and set the your floppy disk to be the first boot device
and set your USB disk to be the second boot device. To get
this to work properly you may have to disable or even unplug
your existing hard drives.
-
FDISK: Boot your PC to your
DOS boot disk, then run FDISK to ensure that your USB drive has
an ACTIVE PARTITION (option 2 in the FDISK menu) then quit FDISK.
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SYSTEM FILES: At the
command prompt type SYS C: (or FORMAT /S C: ) to copy the boot
files to the USB drives primary partition.
-
MBR: At the command prompt
type FDISK /MBR to write a Master Boot Record to the USB drive.
-
TEST: Remove the floppy
disk and restart your computer. If all goes well, the
machine should boot off of your external USB drive.
Much of the above article was based on
THIS article
which you may find useful if you have further questions.
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