Bootable USB

The USB flash drive has become the de facto standard for mobile data transfer.  The flash drive has effectively taken the place of the floppy disk.  One floppy disk function which the flash drive has not addressed (or at least users are not aware of it) is to use it to boot a computer.

For most PCs there’s an option to boot from a CD-ROM.  And if the user would care enough to take the time to study the computer BIOS, he’s notice that there are several other options, including booting through LAN (wake up on LAN), or a ZIP or Omega drive.  Zips and Omega drives are not very common.  At least these drives are not as common as flash drives.  Most everyone has a flash drive.  However, these little devices are not formatted to boot the computer.

To do that, the flash drives have to be formatted in a certain manner, and system files loaded.  With Windows, formatting the disk is fairly simple:  right click on the flash drive and choose “Format”.  The result would be a freshly wiped directory table (for a quick format) or a completely rewritten disk (otherwise).

The last time I needed to format a USB drive and making it bootable I had to download a set of tools called the HP Disk Format Tool.  It’s an easy to download and use program.  There are other possible solutions to make a thumb drive bootable, however, the graphical user interface of the program makes the process that much easier.  But do remember to use FAT32 for the file system.

By the way, if you have a bootable USB disk, it would be a good idea to install Ultimate Boot CD into the the drive.  Among other things, this gives a backdoor to PCs with problems.  Additionally, it’s a whole lot easier to keep these programs on the thumb drive.