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:

1. Open the HP format tool.
2. Make sure you select the correct drive.
3. Choose either of the FAT file system options.
4. Under volume label give the USB drive a name.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Done. Now you can use it as is or add more files to it like I did with ghost and ghostwalk.

Ghost 11 (suite 2.0)

The migration from 7.5 to 11 was not as smooth as I had hoped. We used to netboot and ghostcast that way but with this new version I would have had to edit all the config files and I am not willing to put in the time to figure out how to do that when I’ve never attempted something like that before. So I opted for the boot CD, which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to come by either.

Our newest machines are Dell Optiplex 755’s. I was able to find a forum online where someone posted directions on how to make the boot disk for it with the correct NIC drivers. It worked perfectly, I was finally able to ghostcast.

1. I went to Dell’s support site (support.dell.com) and downloaded the Intel drivers (about 5MB). Or you can download them here; ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R162323.EXE

2. Extracted the contents to a new folder

3. Located the DOSNDIS2 directory. Within there there should be 2 files (e1000.dos and protocol.ini).

4. Created a new file called oemsetup.inf

5. Edit the oemsetup.inf file and copy/paste the following into it.

; OEMSETUP.INF for Broadcom Ethernet Adapter

[netcard]
E1000$=”Intel Ethernet”, 0, NDIS, Ethernet, REAL, E1000$_ini, E1000$_ini

[E1000$_ini]
DriverName=E1000$
device=E1000.dos, @INSTE1000$.dos
NETDIR=5:E1000$.dos

6. Save the file

7. Run the Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard Creator.

8. When asked to Select the Network Driver choose Add

9. Click the Setup Button and point to the NDIS folder you just created.

10. Everything else is default until the end.

Now I’ve hit another snag; we dual boot linux-windows and now linux won’t boot up. I can’t get it to boot up into anything because I’m using the linux bootloader. It’s stuck with GRUB in the upper left corner of the screen. I thought ghost was supposed to work with linux. Anybody know what to do?

Update: I just reinstalled grub and it works perfectly now. Sweet.