[Oliver Aaltonen] Previously, I posted a couple small guides on bootable USB drives, but recently I’ve been receiving reports that the utility mentioned in the guides is not working correctly. In all fairness, the utility was created only for use with a certain type of drive, and whoever made it hasn’t updated it, so problems with newer, unsupported drives are unavoidable. A newer, better utility is now available from HP, the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. (Don’t worry, it can be used with non-HP drives, verified with my Sandisk Cruzer Mini.) The HP utility will allow you to easily create a bootable USB drive, provided you have a disk available with the proper DOS system files, for example a Windows 98 boot floppy.

To clarify the process, I’ve decided to post an update on how to manually make a bootable USB drive.

This rocks - plain and simple. I was trying to get this to work all weekend with bootable CD’s, and had no luck. Basically, I want to be able to boot both my laptop and desktop from the USB Key Drive, specifically to use Ghost 2003. I ended up using the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool on my Lexar JumpDrive, and copied the files from my Ghost disk to it. Works like a charm.

I’m thinking I might go ahead and attempt make the uber USB boot disk, use the XP Boot Manager, and drop all sorts of bootable DOS versions, ghost configurations, etc. for recovery purposes.

Anyways, thanks Oliver - you made my night!