creating a bootable USB flash drive

[surface9]

I recently purchased a nifty 8 gig USB flash drive, and cloned it from
a minimal windows 2000 h/d so as to make it what I *thought* would be
a bootable USB drive. My PC allows for this option, and I did set it
to do that. I used the following command to create the USB drive:
xcopy e:\*.* f:\*.* /s/e/c/h/o/y, where E: is my H/D that has a
minimal windows 2000 on it, and F: is the 8 gig USB flash drive. The
copy took a while but finished OK, and I inspected it windows explorer
and it looks A-OK.

But when I try to boot from it, even before anything happens, I get a
black screen with a message saying something about a pariion table and
no boot sequence - what is wrong here? I can follow the same
procedure (xcopy ...) where my target is a brand new, but formatted h/
d, and it creates me a nice BOOTABLE h/d, cloned from my minimal win2k
h/d.

How do I get this USB drive to be BOOTABLE? Did I need another
step?

 

[philo]

I recently purchased a nifty 8 gig USB flash drive, and cloned it from
a minimal windows 2000 h/d so as to make it what I *thought* would be
a bootable USB drive. My PC allows for this option, and I did set it
to do that. I used the following command to create the USB drive:
xcopy e:\*.* f:\*.* /s/e/c/h/o/y, where E: is my H/D that has a
minimal windows 2000 on it, and F: is the 8 gig USB flash drive. The
copy took a while but finished OK, and I inspected it windows explorer
and it looks A-OK.

But when I try to boot from it, even before anything happens, I get a
black screen with a message saying something about a pariion table and
no boot sequence - what is wrong here? I can follow the same
procedure (xcopy ...) where my target is a brand new, but formatted h/
d, and it creates me a nice BOOTABLE h/d, cloned from my minimal win2k
h/d.

How do I get this USB drive to be BOOTABLE? Did I need another
step?

Win2k does not support booting from a USB drive
though if you Google for it there have been some workarounds.

also: you cannot use xcopy you would need some cloning software

 

[Steph]

Win2k does not support booting from a USB drive
though if you Google for it there have been some workarounds.

Unsupported by MS. In addition, IMHO the OP shouldn't even try such
methods, because doing so will reduce the lifetime of the USB device
dramatically. This is due to essential assumptions MS Windows [as
opposed to certain non-Microsoft OSes] makes relative to its physical
boot device.

Regards