Myself

I must be doing something wrong, because I don't find any maintenance mode or partition manager. Running BootItNG just goes through a few steps and creates a .iso file in the program directory. Running makedisk doesn't work, as it doesn't recognize the drive as a possible destination.BootItNG seems to be a boot manager, in the style of lilo or grub. That doesn't help me. What I'm looking for is something 99% identical to the HP USB boot tool linked in my first post, but without the mandatory "partitioning disk" step.

Making a bootable USB device is easy enough with the HP USB boot tool, but it makes the device all one partition. Making multiple partitions on a USB device is easy enough, using the Disk Management snap-in of compmgmt.msc under XP. I can't seem to do both at once. I've purchased a new 2.5" drive for my laptop, and it currently sits in an external 2.5" USB enclosure. I'd like to prepare a 2-gig bootable FAT partition on the drive, put the XP setup files on there, swap the drive into the laptop, and let XP setup create an NTFS partition in the rest of the unpartitioned space and set itself up in there. The reason is that I have a few tools (Memtest86+ and Spinrite, to be specific) that can't run from Windows, so I like to keep a pure DOS partition at the beginning of the disk. If I leave the XP setup files in there too, it gives me a last-ditch recovery mode too, should the registry or filesystem ever get trashed. Oh, and here's the fun part: My laptop has no optical drive, no floppy drive, and cannot boot from USB. The reason I'm formatting the USB-attached disk as bootable is so that, when I mount it in the laptop itself, it becomes the new system disk. Is there a way to create a bootable DOS partition on a USB device, like the HP tool does, but not have it take up the whole drive?