Bootable USB pen drive

[schmiew1]

Hi All

I have a USB bootable pen drive..,. is there a way I can make this the A: drive instead of the C: drive when used as a bootup device ?

Cheers

SteveC

Edited May 21, 2007 by schmiew1

[kof94]

Probably not since A: and B: are usually reserved for floppy drives. If you are booting to a PE you could probably hard code it to either of these though.

[Mike69]

it depends if the bios detects the usb pen as a usb fdd (a:) or usb hdd (c:)

[kof94]

I can't say I've ever seen a usb key detected as a fdd, only 'removable storage'/hdd.

Saying that, there's no reason why it couldn't be, so it's a valid point.

Edited May 21, 2007 by kof94

[wrayal]

Curiously, I have seen this a couple of times - a USB being recognised partially as a floppy. The driver for the rest of the stick was stored on the 'floppy' portion of the USB, I assume to ensure compatibility with all computers. That said, it was a while ago, and I never looked into it -sorry :S

[jaclaz]

On some motherboards, capable to boot to "super-floppy" type of device it is possible.

You need to format the key WITHOUT a MBR.

This way you would of course loose the capacity to boot from motherboards that NEED "HDD" formatting (with MBR).

The only possible exception is the "special" MBR/bootsetor that makebootfat has, check here for some details:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...13784&st=44

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...0806&st=134

If the problem is just drive lettering, depending on WHICH OS you are going to boot from the stick there might be other solutions.

jaclaz