What Makes A Usb Thumb Drive Bootable?

back in the day, when usb2 first hit the streets, i remember people were excited because of the possibility of booting computers with thumb drives. i read lots of articles on how to do it, and remember that each author, added -> just make sure that your thumb drive can boot your computer. but no one ever explained what that meant. so i always stuck with cds/dvds for booting computers.

fast forward to today, i have a dell computer at work with no dvd drive, that i need to make an image of. i load up acronis true image [ it's on a different computer ] and acronis writes all necessary files to create its linux based rescue media to the thumb drive. i boot the dell computer, specify usb device for booting, and i am told there is no bootable media on the thumb drive. i have tried 2 different thumb drives now.

my usb thumb drives are not "name" brand, more generic [ ok, they were cheap and on sale ].
do i need to buy some name brand usb thumb drive? and which brand(s) would that be?
i guess i don't understand what makes one thumb drive bootable, and the next one not bootable,
and why is this information not specified any where. anyway, thanks for any help.

 

It's not the flash drive. I have a 10+ year old 1 GB flash drive (unknown) with Ubuntu 10 that works just fine.

The imaging program you are using must be on the computer you are backing up.

 

Its not a hardware based issue, any old cheapo thumb will do.

The drive needs to be formatted using a file system recognized by both Windows and Linux (ExFat or NTFS should both be ok dependant on drive size)

Once the file system is organized, then go ahead with software implementations in order to make it bootable.
(Naturally, the bios boot order should be set for this).

 

Rufus , With the linux saved as an iso, and just tick the box to make it bootable, when th software opens
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/rufus.html

 

ok thanks. i must have mis-interpretted all those old articles. i just remember thinking that it was like rolling dice trying to get a thumb drive bootable. at first, i wasn't going to image that computer. it's an older dell sitting in the machine shop area, that only does shipping and receiving, our UPS computer. ups kept support for winxp for many years after its EOL. but with win7, the moment january 2020 started, ups said no newer versions of worldship on anything but win10. i was just going to do the upgrade and cross my fingers, but thought last moment that spending 10 minutes taking the image was a good idea. anyway, i think i'll just cross my fingers and sacrifice some old floppies to the computer gods and do the upgrade. i'm only there one day a week for a few hours. i'll figure out the whole usb boot thing later. thanks!!

 

It also depends on your BIOS if it is an older PC you have to put USB in the boot options (enable). If it is UFEI then you might have to change to legacy boot options.

 

It will take more than 10 minutes to image an older Win 7 computer.

We currently have four Windows 7 computers in the house (2 desktops and 2 laptops). I image them about every 4 weeks booting from either a CD or a USB stick that loads Acronis True Image into RAM.
The fastest (business grade refurbed Dell) requires about 30 minutes for an image. The slowest (crap CPU) takes close to 2 hours and that is only imaging the C partition, not the data partition.

 

This is not correct.
Apologies.

 

no problem eldon, thanks
as far as putting usb in the boot options, pressing F12 during boot brings up a boot menu, where i can then select usb device. seems easier to do that than changing the order in the bios, which is not hard to do, i just like being lazy when possible.
the time it takes me to image that particular computer is reasonable. all it has on it is the win7 installation, and the ups software [ which is less than 1GB in size ] so total disk space used is some where around 15GB or so, i don't remember off hand exactly, but it is definitely under 20GB. so it is not an arduous process to image it.

i have a love/hate relationship with our dell computers. they're good computers, just don't try replacing the power supply in them. they are always some bizarre shape, and even in the towers that have normal looking power supplies, dell poked holes in the sides of the power supply so they can hook into protrusions from the case. so normal power supplies won't fit in the same space unless you can duplicate the holes in the power supply casing, or some how flatten those protrusions in the case. just a bother. then, with that ups computer, it actually has a working dvd drive, but i can not get power to it. it's power supply died, i took it out and then spent close to an hour trying to find some place to buy a new one. dell gave the dvd drive some tiny little SATA power connector, that i have never seen before. that place i found had the correct picture of the power supply, but when it arrived, the power connectors were a bare minimum, one for the motherboard, one for the hard drive, and that's it. i thought about buying a power split-er (sp?) but i have no idea what the proper name is for that tiny little dvd power connector, so i just gave up after some searching. sigh... anyway, thanks again!