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Boot from USB Flash Drive?


Incroyable HULK

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engjcowi

Please READ the previous posts before re-adding same info, already posted by other people.

Besides, if you were trying to help Sonarcade, he needed help to boot from an USB hard drive, NOT an USB stick.

jaclaz

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@Sonarcade

You do not need a floppy drive.

If you have an external USB drive, you can use the "normal" Disk management" to partition it and format it.

If you format the partition as Primary from within windows (2k/XP) it will be already bootable for NT based systems (will look for NTLDR).

If you want to have it run another system, like Win9x/ME, you need to format it as FAT16, then use BOOTPART to recreate the bootsector and copy to the root the system files.

Could you post some more details on what you wsh to accomplish?

jaclaz

Thanks for the response. I'm trying to make a USB hard drive which already is filled to the wazoo a bootable drive without having to format. It's currently formatted at NTFS and has pretty much my XP CD contents copied right into the root of the USB drive. I got an error saying that it can't find NTLDR once I boot from the USB drive so I copied the NTLDR from my internal hard drive. I then got some error about boot.ini, which then got me to copy the boot.ini from my internal drive onto the external. But I have a feeling that I'm going about the wrong way about doing this since it's not really files I need to make it bootable, but the configuration of how these files will react with my USB drive. If the latter, how do I go about configuring these files to fix my problem?

I've also tried to copy the contents of my XP CD onto a DVD instead of making an image of the CD and burning the image onto the DVD. If I just burn the contents without using an image, then I get the same problem. So there's obviously something I'm not getting with this whole boot thing. Thanks.

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@Sonarcade

Maybe there is a basic misunderstanding, making a drive bootable, only means that it will start booting, not that it will actually boot unless an adequate operating system is correctly installed on the drive.

Here is a simple faq:

1) Can I boot Windows XP from an USB drive?

NO.

2) Can I boot DOS/Windows 9x/ME from an USB Drive?

YES.

3) Can I boot Linux from an USB Drive?

YES.

4) So I cannot boot Windows XP from an USB drive?

NO, you CANNOT, but you can boot Bart PE, which is a "modified" Windows XP, so that it can be booted from CD/DVD rom OR from USB.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

USB support is still somehow experimental, but read these:

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7632

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10806

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11213

jaclaz

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@Sonarcade

Maybe there is a basic misunderstanding, making a drive bootable, only means that it will start booting, not that it will actually boot unless an adequate operating system is correctly installed on the drive.

Here is a simple faq:

1) Can I boot Windows XP from an USB drive?

NO.

ah, OK. I can see where I've been unclear. I'm trying to make an unattended windows xp installation on my USB hard drive so I can have all my programs silently installed as well, since a CD can't hold everything. I should've said that in the first place. Phew, thanks for the prompt response. Man, I love this board...and you. :)

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Man, I love this board...and you.

:blushing:

Nonetheless, you can make the drive boot with BartPE or DOS/WIN9x, than install from it, see the given links and these ones:

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11250

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=42891&hl=

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=36062

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=33303

(only problem, if you use an nlited image and boot in DOS/Win9x is that the WINNT.EXE has still some problems, while WINNT32.EXE seems to work OK)

And keep an eye on this:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=42234&hl=

jaclaz

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