Is it possible to place Win2K on one of these new USB 1GB Pen drives and boot a computer from it? I would like to place Win2K and a couple small applications on this and carry it with me when I travel and boot up a friend's machine from it. Is this possible? How about from a USB 260 GB hard drive? (I am not sure what the difference is aside from size)

If so how would I go about doing this?

the idea is great.. not new.. but great..

problem will be driver constelation.. whenn u install win2k on machine a, driver from tis machine will be installed... when hardware of machine b differs from machine a, you will have problems on booting it, because of no drivers..

The specific machine you are trying to boot from has to support booting from a USB drive in BIOS. No support - no boot!

The specific machine you are trying to boot from has to support booting from a USB drive in BIOS. No support - no boot!

I can change this in the bios can't I? I think any machine that can run Win2K or WinXP will be able to boot from this won't it? I am not sure what you mean by "support." Where would I find out if the machine I want to boot supports booting from a USB drive? Is this stated in the BIOS?

"when hardware of machine b differs from machine a, you will have problems on booting it, because of no drivers.. "

So, as I understand it, as long as I have the drivers from machine A (mine) I can then install them on machine B (my friend's) and things will work okay? I am not sure why I would need to install drivers on machine "B" for hardware that is not connected to machine "B" but I can understand that Machine "B" might have drivers for hardware that is not connected to machine "A" In which case it would mean I need the drivers for the machine that I am booting at all times. However, Win2K almost automatically installs drivers when it finds new hardware connected so this might not be such a problem unless I run into someone with odd hardware.

it's not that simple

USB boot support must be from 2 areas in this case:

:: BIOS (hence the motherboard itself),

:: USB drive itself.

BIOS of the m/b must be able to support USB boot-up. this means that the m/b must be able to detect the presence of USB drive and the ability to boot from it.

The USB drive itself must be able to support boot-up (or bootable) through using the bundled software. this support depend on whether the USB drive's controller support boot-up.

FYI, every single USB devices, i.e. pen drives, memory cards such as MMC, SD, RS-MMC, miniSD, card readers, WILL have at least 1 main controller. this controller is the 'processor' of the device that dictate the speed, data processing, etc. etc. ...