USB Thumb Drive Recovery Console

[Tim Judd]

Hi there,

I hear that Windows does not officially support booting from a USB
device (as a primary boot drive).

Is it possible to create a bootable USB thumb drive that will boot a
recovery console? Either a Win2000 or WinXP console would work, but I
will be creating it on a Windows 2000 Professional machine.

thank you for any input.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi there,

I hear that Windows does not officially support booting from a USB
device (as a primary boot drive).

Is it possible to create a bootable USB thumb drive that will boot a
recovery console? Either a Win2000 or WinXP console would work, but I
will be creating it on a Windows 2000 Professional machine.

thank you for any input.

Use a Bart PE boot CD. Its tried and proven technology and
it works for all versions of Windows.

 

[Tim Judd]

Use a Bart PE boot CD. Its tried and proven technology and
it works for all versions of Windows.

Are you saying that the Microsoft Recovery Console won't be able to be
booted from the USB drive?

 

[Sid Knee]

Use a Bart PE boot CD. Its tried and proven technology and
it works for all versions of Windows.

Interesting question though ... and it raises the further question in my
mind as to whether a Bart's PE Boot CD could be written to (and booted
from) a USB flash-drive (thumb drive). Which would be more portable than
a CD - even the mini-cd that I use for my own Bart's Boot (and other
diagnostic/utility boot cd's).

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Are you saying that the Microsoft Recovery Console won't be able to be
booted from the USB drive?

I have never heard of the Recovery Console booting from a USB drive.
AFAIK it does not even have a USB driver.

 

[Tim Judd]

Interesting question though ... and it raises the further question in my
mind as to whether a Bart's PE Boot CD could be written to (and booted
from) a USB flash-drive (thumb drive). Which would be more portable than
a CD - even the mini-cd that I use for my own Bart's Boot (and other
diagnostic/utility boot cd's).

I know and have used the BartPE system on many USB devices. My personal
experience is that it WILL ALWAYS load faster off the CD-ROM versus the
USB drives due to the transfer speeds alone.

480Mbit/second roughly translates to 57.2MByte/sec, on a full saturation
with no I/O overhead or disk latency. CD-ROMs are 52x (1x =
150KByte/sec) = 7.6MByte/sec. Somehow, the CD drive just operates
faster on LOTS of files, but has expensive spin-up and spin-down for
few, small files. A micro-CD (8mm) would even work with some
modifications. Typical clean BartPE .ISO image size is ~150MBytes.
Those disks will take ~210MByte.

Pegasus' statement that the Recovery Console doesn't even include USB
drivers has an excellent point that if there are no drivers, how will
the data be read?