July 12th 2009 02:20 am
Create bootable USB thumb drive, it’s easier than you thought.
USB thumdrive or pendrive some might call it, is a very innovative product in this decade. Its small size and high capacity means the demise of floppy drive. Having a thumbdrive is convenient for storing your pictures, documents, mp3, videos and you can bring it along to anywhere in your pocket. Thumbdrive can actually do more than just storing data, you can even install an OS (operating system) with it. Well, that’s an article for other time. I’m going to talk about creating a USB bootable thumbdrive in a simple way. Forget the countless steps you have to follow on other guides, creating a bootable USB drive is as simple as format the drive only, with a correct utility of course.
Remember the last time you use a floppy disk to transfer files? Well, I certainly do, and it was troublesome. Having to swap disk one by one and encountered numerous times of data failure, floppy disk is very fragile. USB thumbdrive was introduced in the early of this decade, it was expensive back then. Fast forward to present time, you can get a 4GB at less than RM50(USD 14).
Having a bootable USB thumbdrive is convenient enough for me to do maintenance on my PC like formatting hard drive, restore a failed hard disk via CHKDSK command and flash the BIOS of my motherboard.
To create a bootable USB thumbdrive, you will need to download this HP USB Disk Storage Format and the MS-DOS startup files here.
Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format utility on your PC first. Then extract the MS-DOS startup files which is in a ZIP file named as win98boot.zip to a folder on your PC. The win98boot.zip contains all necessary boot files for your USB boot drive to work, you can actually use any other MS-DOS version as you like, a simple googling can yield few results of this.
Format a bootable USB drive using this utility is easy
Select the “Create a DOS startup disk” option and click the radio button “using DOS system files located at”. Browse to the location where you extracted the win98boot.zip files (or any other MS-DOS startup files variant). Click “Start” button to begin format. When you are done, you will get a pop up like the one below.
USB thumbdrive is in bootable format now
Restart your PC and make sure your motherboard supports booting from USB drive, select that option from your BIOS and you’ll be able to boot from your USB.
5 Comments »
Ripul on 12 Jul 2009 at 2:59 am #
Gr8 stuff Fellow! m going to try this out !
gmailler43 on 12 Jul 2009 at 11:14 pm #
i tried your method, but it doesn’t seems work, how to check my BIOS supports booting from usb drive?
numBerMan on 20 Jul 2009 at 3:20 pm #
this is the simplest method of creating usb thumb drive that I can find on the internet! good job ! keep on posting great tips!
numBerMan on 20 Jul 2009 at 3:20 pm #
this is the simplest method of creating a bootable usb thumb drive that I can find on the internet! good job ! keep on posting great tips!
IMonline. on 23 Aug 2009 at 2:23 am #
“Create bootable USB thumb drive, it’s easier than you thought.” Thnx for the tips, I wouldnt have know creating bootable usb thumb drive would be that easy.