bootable USB Drive

[Farhan]

I want to make my Imation Nano 2GB flash drive as bootable.
I tried some methods mentioned at bootdisk.com including HP format tool.
I changed boot seuence in BIOS with USB ZIP first device.

but when i boot my computer it bios shows NANO but when it reaches
"verifyiing DMI pool data........." it doesnt go any further.


what do i do to make my flash drive bootable?

Farhan

 

[Malke]

I want to make my Imation Nano 2GB flash drive as bootable.
I tried some methods mentioned at bootdisk.com including HP format tool.
I changed boot seuence in BIOS with USB ZIP first device.

but when i boot my computer it bios shows NANO but when it reaches
"verifyiing DMI pool data........." it doesnt go any further.


what do i do to make my flash drive bootable?

You forgot to tell us what operating system you are trying to put on the
flash drive to which you want to boot. If you are trying to do this with XP
(since you are posting in an XP newsgroup I assume XP has something to do
with your question), then it will never work since XP can't boot from a USB
thumb drive.

If you are trying to boot to some form of Linux (the usual thing), probably
posting to a newsgroup and/or forum for that distro would be the thing to
do.

Malke

 

[BillW50]

In Malke typed on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:42:11 -0700:

You forgot to tell us what operating system you are trying to put on
the flash drive to which you want to boot. If you are trying to do
this with XP (since you are posting in an XP newsgroup I assume XP
has something to do with your question), then it will never work
since XP can't boot from a USB thumb drive.

If you are trying to boot to some form of Linux (the usual thing),
probably posting to a newsgroup and/or forum for that distro would be
the thing to do.

Well many claim it can't be done with XP, but the truth that it can. The
trick is hacking the registry to stop Windows from resetting the USB
ports. I'll post more about this when I have more time today. Here is
one way which I don't recommend for now.

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=378472#p378472

 

[John John - MVP]

In Malke typed on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:42:11 -0700:

Well many claim it can't be done with XP, but the truth that it can. The
trick is hacking the registry to stop Windows from resetting the USB
ports.

The trick is hacking the registry so that ntldr loads the USB stack
before it passes control of the boot process to ntoskrnl.exe. It's just
an issue with the way the USB stack is initialized, the stack and its
drivers are not loaded or started during the early booting stage, ntldr
doesn't load these drivers so the Session Manager cannot make use of the
devices, the stack is only initialized long after the Session Manager
has started the Windows session. Microsoft has never supported this
booting method and they have never made this a priority for their "full"
Windows versions. Windows PE and Windows Embedded can be booted on USB
devices. For all it's worth, most of those who have succeeded in
booting the full Windows version on USB are mostly less than impressed
with the results, USB drives are slow when compare to others.

John

 

[smlunatick]

I want to make my Imation Nano 2GB flash drive as bootable.
I tried some methods mentioned at bootdisk.com including HP format tool.
I changed boot seuence in BIOS with USB ZIP first device.

but when i boot my computer it bios shows NANO but when it reaches
"verifyiing DMI pool data........." it doesnt go any further.

what do i do to make my flash drive bootable?

Farhan

You need to set the BIOS to either USB floppy or USB harddrive. USB
ZIP seems to be buggy.

 

[Farhan]

Booting in DOS mode will do, as we can with bootable CDs. I want to run SETUP
from dos to install XP.

 

[John John - MVP]

The Windows XP CD is bootable and you will be able to install Windows XP
without needing to resort to DOS. The Windows XP CD will boot your
computer to a native 32-bit NT environment and handle all installation
tasks properly.

If you need to resort to a 16-bit installation environment you can
launch the 16-bit Winnt.exe installer from the i386 folder on the
Windows XP CD. Note that you will not be able to install XP on an NTFS
drive with Winnt.exe. Also note that when using the 16-bit installer
you should use smartdrv.exe for disk caching.

John

 

[Farhan]

I tried that but its not even stops there and goes directly to hdd to boot
from.


Farhan

 

[Al]

The drive must be formatted - a partition created - made active/primary -
drive letter assignment may or may not be required - boot system files
installed.
All can be accomplished with diskpart.exe. A good tutorial regarding Win 7
installation from a bootable USB device - Google or Bing.