Boot from USB "thumb" drive?

[Ken from Chicago]

I have an HP zd7000 notebook with XP saying unmountable boot volume and it
boot from the System Restore or Application Recovery disk but it will boot
often Norton's Anti-Virus CD but then it won't recognize the C drive and if
I switch CDs it says it can't read from it that the drive is no longer valid
and pick another letter. Even when I put the Norton CD back in it says
current drive no longer valid and asks for another letter.

I've tried all the Safe Boots, (from networking, from command prompt, from
last working configuration), and even tried booting Windows normally same
deal, the safe boots starts showing multipartition stuff and hangs when it
gets to agp440.sys and / or I hit a blue screen for a second I see
Unmountable Boot before it cuts to black and reboot to various Safe /
Windows boot options.

In the BIOS setup it has an option for booting from removable devices and
was wondering if I can boot from one of those USB "thumb" drive?

-- Ken from Chicago

 

[Robert Moir]

In the BIOS setup it has an option for booting from removable devices
and was wondering if I can boot from one of those USB "thumb" drive?

You can if you have a thumb drive that supports this, with a bootable
operating system on it. What do you hope to achieve with this?

 

[John]

If you have a windows xp disk, or a disk that has xp on it, you should be
able to run the repair console from the disk. Make sure the bios is set for
the cd-rom drive to boot first and then when windows is loading off the disk
it asks you if you want to enter the repair console, hit the button it
specifies (I forget which one). Once you are in the repair console it will
ask you which drive, hit c, then on the next prompt type fixboot. That
should write a new boot sector.

John

 

[Slippery_one]

You can if you have a thumb drive that supports this, with a
bootable operating system on it. What do you hope to achieve with
this?

Wondrous things!

 

[Harry Ohrn]

Read both pages here http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1676
You can create a bootable USB drive providing you have
1) BIOS that supports booting USB drive
2) A tool that will correctly format the USB drive (link on 2nd page of
above article)
3) bootable files (either image or floppy) to copy to the formatted USB
drive

If you are working with NTFS then you should also copy a reader like NTFS
Reader for DOS to the thumb drive http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm