Bootable USB

Anyone tinkering with computers has a plethora of tools that they employ. One that I have been using more frequently is the bootable USB key. For me, this has been due to many motherboard manufacturer's problematic motherboards (ASUS, GigaByte, etc) needing BIOS updates.

For those that haven't noticed, the floppy drive is being phased out. You may not see a floppy drive when looking at a new computer. A floppy drive has to be requested as an add-on. I am happy to see the floppy media removed as it was a pain to deal with. One problem was that you never knew if a floppy disk was still good or not. We have a tougher means of storage ... the USB flash drive.

USB Flash drives/sticks/keys AKA Thumb drives have slowly been growing in popularity over the last 5 years. More compact than a CD/DVD and available in a variety of storage sizes up to 8GB.

Well, lets get to creating a bootable USB key.

1. Download HP's USB Disk Storage Format Tool
2. Download the BASE version of FreeDOS
3. Download an image mounting program such as Daemon Tools
4. Install Daemon Tools. I recommend not installing the 'additions' that so many software makers are adding in to their installers.
5. Install the HP's USB Disk Storage Format Tool (at the time of writing, I am using version 2.1.8)
   
6. Mount image of FreeDOS using Daemon Tools
7. Start HP's USB Disk Storage Format Tool (Note: in Vista you have to 'Run as Administrator' so be sure to to Shift+Right-Click on the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool icon and select Run as Administrator from the context menu)
8. In the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool dialog window for Device select your USB Flash Drive
9. Click the checkbox labelled 'Create a DOS startup disk' so that it is checked on
10. For the option 'using DOS system files located at:' click the button with the label of '...' and browse to the drive that holds the mounted image of FreeDos. Then drill down to select the directory holding the DOS files; FREEDOS -> SETUP -> ODIN
11. Click the 'Start' button.
12. Once that has completed you'll see that there are only 2 files on your USB Flash Drive (If my memory serves me they were AUTOEXEC.BAT and COMMAND.COM). So I copied the files from the FREEDOS/SETUP/ODIN directory onto the USB flash drive with the exclusion of the 2 files that were already in the directory.
    
13. Add in your files that you'll need after your system has booted from your USB Flash Drive. (See below)
    

I recommend creating a folder 'programs' on your bootable USB Flash Drive, and then add subfolders for each of the following programs:

• Memtest (Download the Pre-Compiled EXE file for USB Key)
• BIOS for BIOS Flash utilities

The article that started it all was genetikayos - FreeDOS on a USB Flash drive