O'Reilly Network Weblogs: Utility to make USB flash drives bootable

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Utility to make USB flash drives bootable

by Damien Stolarz,
Oct. 11, 2004
URL: http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html

I found a couple of links for creating bootable flash drives that I found useful.
How to boot from a USB device ... has good instructions, and this worked for me, and took about 20 minutes.

Then I found this utility: HP bootable flash utility
And it worked for me as well, and took about a minute.

The cool thing is, the HP utility is reported to work with many other flash drives - I have a no-name USB 2.0 thumb drive, made it bootable with the HP utility on a 1.1 USB bus, and then used it to boot a Via EPIA-M2 computer by setting the BIOS to "boot from USB hard drive".

Although I'm quite comfortable with the command line and a 2 page FAQ, running a GUI and clicking "make bootable" sure speeds things up.

Damien Stolarz, is an inventor who's made different kinds of computers talk to each other for a decade. He co-founded Blue Falcon Networks to architect and develop networking software. In 2002, Damien created Robotarmy, a high-technology consulting firm.