The USB Mass Storage Working Group is preparing a specification on booting USB devices to enable booting from USB within the industry. Boot from USB has become a highly requested feature. Both USB flash drive (UFD) and USB CD-ROM drives are in a position to pave the way of new booting features on USB. Enabling users to boot from UFD and USB CD-ROM requires industry-wide cooperation to ensure good user experiences with these devices.
The most interesting applications for booting from a USB device focus on operating system deployment, system recovery, and system maintenance. Key scenarios, listed below, are explored later in this post:
- Operating system installation/deployment scenario
- Floppy disk drive replacement
- System diagnostics tools
- Disk duplication/manipulation (for example, partitioning and formatting utilities)
- Key scenarios for booting off a USB storage device
- Windows requirements on boot devices.
- Requirements and recommendations for various industry partners
- BIOS manufactures
- System builders for home/business PCs.
- UFD manufacturers (IHVs)
The information in this post is intended for x86 BIOS vendors, IHVs, and OEMs to encourage cooperation in creating USB-boot-enabled products for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems
For starters this is still a new science and many people have had good luck with at least one of these methods and others have not. Note that flash drives are often also called thumb drives, keychain drives, pendrives, etc.
A FEW THINGS YOU NEED TO CONSIDER IN ADVANCE.
1. The PC has to support booting from a USB flash drive. There may be anywhere from 1-3 items to change in the BIOS to make this possible assuming your BIOS supports it. Some bios's may refer to your flash drive as a USB floppy or USB zip.
2. The USB flash drive must support booting from it in general.
3. The flash drive must contain the boot/system files.
4. The flash drive must have bootsector area. This is done with special utilities.
5. References to "A:" drive lines in the autoexec.bat and/or config.sys files you copy to the drive after you make it bootable may result in errors.
6. You "may" have to format your floppy disk first in WinXP before you create a bootdisk as XP may "not" like working later on with a disk formatted otherwise.
7. Included below is a bootable ISO of DOS 7.1 which may be used with some of these methods if you do not have a 1.44 drive.
METHODS
Method 1 - Make your flash drive bootable using Bart's mkbt util:
Put a bootable floppy disk in your A: drive or create one using Windows.
Download mkbt20.zip (search google) and unpack to to new temp folder you create.
Go to the temp folder.
Extract the bootsector from the bootable floppy disk. eg Open a DOS Window and go to the directory where you extracted MKBT. Type:
mkbt -c a: bootsect.bin
The boot sectors from the bootable floppy disk have just been saved to a file in the temp folder you created.
Format the flash drive in FAT or FAT16.
Copy the bootsector to the flash drive. Open a DOS Window and go to the folder where you extracted MKBT. Type:
mkbt -x bootsect.bin Z:
"Z" represents the flash drive drive Letter. So if your flash drive has another drive letter, then change the "Z" accordingly.
Now you can [grin]
"should" be able to copy the utils ( Recovery and Anti-Virus Softwares 
) you need to the pen drive.Method 2 - Try these 2 HP/Compaq USB Flash Drive Utilities. They work with many other brands of flash drives as well.
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool Version 2.0.6
HP Drive Key Boot Utility Version 7.41
(search google)
Method 3
Here is my another method for creating dos bootable USB sticks using windows format.
1. From Win98 DOS-Prompt type "SYS {USBDriveLetter}:" or "FORMAT {USBDriveLetter} /U /S". If from WinXp then from start->run command.com execute format.exe copied from win95 or win98.
OR
2. Simply by enabling copy system files in windows explorer format window. By default it is disabled for non-floppy drives. To enable it use windows enabler program Enabler (search google) an whoila it works.
Method 5
First if you don't have a physical floppy drive (and don't want one) you can use the [free] "virtual floppy driver" (search google)
With that you get an A: drive and can manipulate a floppy image as if you were using real floppy. You can then use that image to make a bootable CD. It's not that user friendly but once you get how it works it does work perfectly.
Even cooler you can use a "raw write" utility like dd for windows to write the floppy image directly to your USB thumb drive. Even without that famous HP utility to do the magic this will make your USB thumb drive bootable. The 'dd' ported to Windows (search google)
Another trick you can use with that dd utility involves MS VritualPC (which is free). You can create a virtual machine/virtual hard drive, set it up the way you want then use dd to "raw write" the virtual hard drive image to the thumb drive; this will make the thumb drive identical to the image, including bootable (again, no HP utilities required).
Of course, your thumb drive will effectively have the capacity the size if the image in question (your 1GB flash drive will effectively be 1.44 Megs).
BareBones Boot Floppy And ISO
DOS 7.10 (search google)
FOOT NOTES :
Operating system installation/deployment scenario - Mobile platforms or low-profile desktop systems may ship without embedded floppy disk drives. Having a bootable UFD with an OEM pre-installation environment dramatically simplifies the task of OS installation. This is a valuable scenario for the OEM and for corporate IT administrators or the home consumer seeking to deploy or redeploy an operating system.
System diagnostic tools - IT managers may need to run system utilities on a machine without starting the operating system, or to recover a system with a non-starting operating system. For systems that do not have a bootable floppy/CDROM and lack Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) bootability, booting off UFDs is both compelling and simple. IT managers can also carry their system diagnostic tools on a 512 MB UFD and perform their tests easily. This is a valuable scenario for corporate consumers or the home consumer seeking to recover data from a non-bootable system.
Disk duplication/manipulation/verification - Disk partitioning and formatting utilities need to run before operating system startup or from another operating system. It is possible to boot off a UFD that also contains partitioning utilities or other diagnostic utilities. It is also possible to include a virus checker on a read-only UFD for disk verification purposes. This is a valuable scenario for the OEM and for corporate consumers or the home consumer seeking to configure or reinstall the operating system for deployment or recovery.
Windows Requirements for Boot Devices
The best thing about adding another bootable bus to Windows is that manufacturers can take advantage of much of the existing Windows boot process. As long as a new device looks and behaves like existing devices while NT Loader loads the system, new devices can be made to work like old devices. The goal for booting Windows from a USB device is to use as much of the existing Windows boot process with as little change as possible.
This post focuses solely on booting from hard disk drives and CD-ROM drives for recovery and deployment purposes. Windows as it exists today is currently not optimized to run as an installed operating system from USB attached mass-storage or CD.
The USB Mass Storage support consists of storage protocols over USB that enable USB hard disk drives and USB CD-ROM drives. All storage devices that are to be boot devices for Windows should behave like one of those two categories to take advantage of the existing boot process. DVD-ROM drives fit into the category of CD-ROM drives for the purpose of this document.
BIOS must support INT 13h During the boot process, Windows assumes that support for communicating with the boot device, either hard disk drive or CD-ROM drive, is present in INT 13h when Windows loads because the NT Loader uses calls to INT 13h to access the disk. INT 13h support must comply with the "BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services - 2" specification and the "USB Mass Storage Specification for Bootability," The newer specification is considered the authority if the two specifications contradict each other.
Accurate drive numbering by BIOS Windows also requires that the assignment of drive numbers follows "Compaq Phoenix Intel BIOS Boot Specification version 1.01." Hard disk drives should begin numbering at 80h and CD-ROM drives should begin numbering at 82h, as in the past.
In this post, the remainder of the requirements, along with recommendations for component manufacturers, has been organized by the different components that play a part in booting.
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