Flash Drive As "Drive A:"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Prabir Mittra
  • Start date Start date
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Prabir Mittra

Using Notebooks:

Situation: Repairing Hardisks/Operating systems, Cloning hardisks,
backingup hardisks using USB Hard-drives.

Problem: Using floppy drive to boot DOS or programs is very slow. Example
Windos XP rescue disk consists of 4 diskettes. Further floppy disk has read
errors after long storage.

Using Bootable Flash Drive - seen as Drive C (W98 Dos) and thus in notebook
(Dell D820) with internal hard-drive a maximun of two hard-disk is seen. USB
Hard-drive cannot be seen in Ghost 2003. If boot from Floppy Drive the USB
Hard-drive is seen as physical drive 2.

Wish: Make Bootable Flash Drive behave has Floppy Drive: Place XP Rescue
program in Flash drive - booting a lot faster.

Alternative: Boot from CD-ROM - How to make bootable and place programs
there. XP's Create Rescue does not create it CD format. Also when booting
from CDDrive it will be seen as Drive C:

I would appreciate comments and guidance or pointers.

Prabir Mittra
 
It won't happen in XP and probably not Vista. However, MS may open up a
link for suggestions for Windows 7 (likely) so save your very good idea for
then. Since this is not a managed newsgroup MS will not pick up your
suggestion from here.
 
There is a way to make a bootable Windows rescue disc. As John John suggests,
the BartPE boot disc <http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/> is a good place to start,
but it takes a lot of time to find/create/add and test the additional plug-ins
you may need.

I recommend the UBCD4WIN CD instead. This is like a BartPE CD on steroids. It
utilizes the Bart compiler (PEBuilder) to generate the ISO image and then burns
the image to a CD and it has most of the freeware utilities and drivers you'll
need already configured for you. Naturally, some updates are required for the AV
utilities.

See this link for more info and to download all requirements. As I mentioned,
this now includes the BartPE builder software. It's all free:

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

Note that you'll need to have a Windows XP SP2 installation CD to create this
CD. There is no Product Key required during creation nor is a product activation
required after installation.
 
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