Bootable USB Falsh drive.....

OK here's a good one, and there are millions of pages written on it and they are split down the middle....
I have a ton of troubleshooting software and things on a usb flash drive that would be great if I could boot into,

Half of what I have read says you can, the other half says you can't, the best article was a very lengthy and detailed article that explains how to rewrite a boot file just for flash drives so that they will boot and will report the correct size, and also reports to the system a sector, heads, landing zone, all the same that a bootable hard drive would, and after all that it is for a fat16, with Win98 on the flash drive, there are wild debates on MSDN about booting iso images from flash drives, if nothing else it is all great reading, but my question is more unanswered now then when I started. Now I have a great little floppy disk that allows for booting usb drives, but wont recognize a flash drive.

Does anyone have any ideas of a good way to boot to a flash drive, and before you tell me that it can only be done through BIOS, then we are on the wrong page, choosing boot to usb device in bios isn't the problem it's making the flash drive bootable. HP and M$ have good little programs and M$'s will write an autorun to the usb, which will boot when you install the drive while running windows, but it will not boot to the drive, I have tried Bart's PE and nLite but that puts you back to the problem of booting to an ISO...as you can see this gets to be like a dog chasing it's tail, and surely I am not the first person that has wanted to do this, and surely with all the ways that people have found to solve computer problems there has to be a way around this.

 

My first question is....what is it you want it to boot to?

Or, do you want the windows boot files to be on it?

 

I want to boot to the drive??? I have a usb stick version of windows, but I think if I can solve the boot problem it might be Michael K H Au-Yeung - Super WinPE UBCD 2004 Pro, which would be way handy to have on a flash drive!

 

You cannot boot the drive, without knowing exactly what files you want to boot with.

As for that CD...lets pretend you didn't mention it, because its chock full of pirated software.

 

OK I guess I started a holy war....

Let me try to explain a little better,

While I do have a copy of a usb stick drive version of Windows that does not mean I am installing it anywhere!, and using my legal copy of windows XP and nLite (a program easily available here at MG) Anyone can make a tiny version of XP, now what you do with it determines if it's legal or not! What my thinking is that while I must have a license to install a copy of XP to a computer, I do not have to have a separate license to transfer system files to a floppy or to a hard drive to make them bootable and some how don't think I do for a usb drive, further "after further review" of the EULA if I am not installing it then there is not a problem. I am trying to create a bootable USB drive that will boot and allow me access to troubleshooting files.
I want to make the USB drive with enough on it that it will boot. Now as TimW states Bart's and Windows does not allow for...Well yes it does, I can install a licensed copy of Windows on my computer as many times as I wish, and after I certain number of times I have to call M$ and get their blessing, but still can keep installing it to the same machine, the only question, or maybe confusion here is if a usb drive is part of a machine, I say you have the right to as it is as much a part of your computer as any floppy disk which you are allowed to transfer system files to. As far as the opinion on SuperWinPE I wasn't asking for an opinion on the software.
I wasn't asking for the legality of it, I was asking the technical part of it, I have licensed copies of Windows all the way back to 95, and currently working on my system builders license. By some of the interpretations I guess no one can ever upgrade a hard drive because then it is not the original machine that the COA license was issued for.
There has to be a way to format a USB drive with enough on it to create a bootable USB flash drive...Linux has a ton of Live CD's surely there is a way to transfer enough of a system to a flash drive to make it a valuable tool for troubleshooting. I have played with M$'s utility and HP's they both are good, but they are not quite there.

 

It can be done...I've done it. Now, my situation called for booting into DOS, but you should be able to apply what I did. Here's a write-up I did for another forum I frequent:

 

Yeah thats a lot closer to what I am looking for and I already have the Hp file that you refer to. And see the trick there with the DOS commands. Will experiment with it and let you know. Thanks for the reply!

 

I know it's been a few days, but I ran across this article while searching for something else. It looks to address exactly what you're trying to do:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=7632&st=0