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How to make a flash drive boot disk?

techie81

techie81

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I need to make a boot disk using my flash drive, however I do not have a floppy disk drive. How would I make something like this?
 
Polaris573

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Make sure you BIOS can support booting from a USB device and set it to a higher priority than your hard disk.

Download and install this utility.

When it asks, tell it to format your USB drive as a floppy disk. Then, when it asks for an image use the file I've attached to this post.
 
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techie81

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Polaris573 said:
Make sure you BIOS can support booting from a USB device and set it to a higher priority than your hard disk.

Download and install this utility.

When it asks, tell it to format your USB drive as a floppy disk. Then, when it asks for an image use the file I've attached to this post.
Click to expand...

Thanks! When I boot off the flash drive, it hangs at "freeing up memory 256" something along those lines.

Also, is this loading Linux?
 
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hat

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So I can use this to flash my video card bios? (though I do have a floppy drive just not installed, is that reccommended to use over this?)
 
Polaris573

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techie81 said:
Thanks! When I boot off the flash drive, it hangs at "freeing up memory 256" something along those lines.

Also, is this loading Linux?
Click to expand...

I don't know what's causing that, it works fine for me. No, it's not loading linux.

hat said:
So I can use this to flash my video card bios? (though I do have a floppy drive just not installed, is that reccommended to use over this?)
Click to expand...

It doesn't matter what you use to do it, the preferred way is whatever you feel comfortable with. You can use a floppy, USB drive, or Boot CD. Personally, I use the Ultimate Boot CD.
 
hat

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Polaris, I almost got uber pissed at you...
For one thing: my motherboard won't boot with the USB drive in... I thought the utility killed my mobo
For another: when I formatted, I only had a few KB left of my flash drive...
luckily I was able to reformat the drive back to stock... I should just use a real floppy drive...
 
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techie81

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Where could I get a utility that would make it bootable with say just a simple boot config like a windows 98 disk?
 
Polaris573

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hat said:
Polaris, I almost got uber pissed at you...
For one thing: my motherboard won't boot with the USB drive in... I thought the utility killed my mobo
Click to expand...

The utility might damage your USB drive, but that is extremely doubtful. The only way you could have damaged your motherboard doing this would be to force the USB drive in the wrong way. Don't be silly.

You did exactly what you needed to resolve the problem. You knew when a removable drive doesn't boot properly, that something isn't set up correctly so you removed the drive. Exactly like having a non-bootable floppy disk in your computer. Your computer won't boot in that situation either correct?

For another: when I formatted, I only had a few KB left of my flash drive...
Click to expand...
It does that.

luckily I was able to reformat the drive back to stock... I should just use a real floppy drive...
Click to expand...

Luck had nothing to do with it, the software formatted your drive that way. Formatting it back fixes the problem.

Obviously this isn't the best way to do this since you both had problems. Here is where I learned how to make USB boot disks. The way I showed you was the one I thought was the easiest, maybe it would be best if you looked through the list and found one that works for you.
 
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hat

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THe utility doesn't even leave enough room on my thumb dirve to put the flashing utilities I need on it! :( I would rather do it the safe way
 
Polaris573

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I still suggest Ultimate Boot CD, I have the link a few posts back. You can boot to DOS and run the flashing utilities right off your hard disk, it's safer too because you don't have to worry about a corrupt floppy.
 
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