How to create a bootable USB drive
You would think that you would be able to Google the title of this post and easily find a link that would make this possible. I’ve spent a lot of time the last few days doing that exact same thing and not finding much in the way of things that actually work. I wanted a bootable usb drive so I could throw ghost and ghostwalk on it and whatever image we wanted to use. It would save me from having to burn a new CD every time I wanted to use a different image, this way I just delete and copy/paste.
What you will need:
- Boot disk files – you can Google boot disk and get what you need. If you still have a floppy drive in your computer and happen to have a disk laying around you can pop it in, go to my computer -> right-click on the floppy -> format -> and check the box that says create an MS-DOS startup disk.
- HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool – The weird thing is that I couldn’t even find that on their website. But once again Google comes to the rescue, there are plenty of links to it out there.
What to do:
- Open the HP format tool.
- Make sure you select the correct drive.
- Choose either of the FAT file system options.
- Under volume label give the USB drive a name.
- Check the box for creating a DOS startup disk and select using dos system files located at:. This is where you either point to your floppy drive if you created a boot disk or to the folder where you downloaded the files to. Tell it to start.
- You aren’t quite done yet. Go to my computer and open the location of the startup files that you either downloaded or had windows put on the floppy – copy those and paste them onto the flash drive. DO NOT overwrite any files when prompted.
- Done. Now you can use it as is or add more files to it like I did with ghost and ghostwalk.
