Maintain your Windows PC; Part 1: Make your USB Flashdrive Bootable

This is the first part of a series of articles about maintaing your windows PC using a USB flashdrive (also called USB pen drives, USB thumb drives and USB Keys). The first part explains the usefulness of the USB flash drives as well as how to turn it into a bootable one. Later in the series we will add utilities and applications to the pen drive to make it useful.



Your friend calls you and tells you that he needs your help in recovering some important data he just deleted. If your friend has internet connectivity, it’s fine. You could download one of the many data recovery software freely available on the net and get his data back for him. What if he didn’t have an internet connection? What if his Microsoft Windows Operating System has crashed or failed due to some unknown reason? How do you get your data back for him? There are lots of other situations like these where you wish you had your own set of utilities and applications you have come to trust over the years and would like to have them in a CD/DVD for instant gratification. You would also like to have them updated regularly or at the least manually update them so that you don’t leave yourself fretting and fuming at the last moment. Again, CD’s & DVD’s have this problem of not being read in particular drives, or scratches can cause them not to work properly. You may even loan it to a friend and forget to take it back from him or your friend may pass it on to his friend!

This is where a USB thumb drive or pen drive or flash drive or anything else that you may want to call it, comes in handy. You will not only carry your important data in it, it’s possible to use it as a Swiss Army Knife for the Personal Computer. You can update the software in it regularly. You can make it bootable. We will show you how to create one. We will also tell you where to find some of the best free applications & utilities that you can copy to this pen drive and take it along with you.

No, you will not be installing applications. Just copy some of the files of a particular application and run it off the drive. You will ask “how does this matter?”. It does matter. All Microsoft Windows compatible applications and software write settings to a master database in the Operating System called the “Registry”. This Registry, over a period of time is filled with unwanted data, especially if you keep installing new applications, games, utilities and then uninstalling them too. Uninstalling software is pretty easy. But, are the registry settings & files that this software used been removed? I would say NO. This is where a new and fast growing concept of “Portable Software” comes in. No installations. No registry entries. Just download the software and run it.

All right then. Get your pen drive ready so that we can make it bootable. You will need an active internet connection to download all the software listed in this article. You will also need to make a back up of all your existing data in the pen drive before continuing. We will not be held responsible for any data loss occurring because of the content published in this article.

A few points that need to be considered before proceeding:

1. The PC has to support booting from a USB flash drive. There may be anywhere from 1-3 items to change in the BIOS to make this possible assuming your BIOS supports it. Some BIOS’s may refer to your flash drive as a USB floppy or USB zip drive or show it to you as a Hard Disk Drive too.
2. The USB flash drive must support booting from it in general.
3. The flash drive must contain the boot/system files.
4. The flash drive must have a boot sector area. This is done with special utilities as shown below.
5. Before you proceed, please download & install 7zip and/or UniExtract to extract files from a compressed archive. We are assuming that you know about compressed files and folders and how to work with them.
6. You will need important DOS files to make the pen drive bootable. You can download them from this link. Extract the files to a directory of your choice. I recommend C:\DOSfiles or wherever you like. Just remember the location of these extracted files.

Steps to create a bootable pen drive:

1) Download the file SP27213.exe from either here or here.

2) This utility is provided by HP to make USB pen drives bootable. Just go ahead and install this software in Windows. This works on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

3) After you are done installing this, insert the pen drive you want to make as bootable into one of the free USB ports of your PC. Warning: Please back up the data in the USB flash drive before proceeding to the next step.

4) Click on Start -> All Programs -> Hewlett-Packard Company -> HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.

5) You should see a screen similar to the one shown below.

• Under Device, select the Pen Drive that you want to make bootable.
• Under File system, select FAT32.
• Under Volume label, click in the blank space & type in the name you want to give to this pen drive.
• Under Format options, place a check mark on Quick Format and Create a DOS startup disk.
• Once you have checked Create a DOS startup disk, the options below it will get activated.
• Select using DOS system files located at:, and then browse to the drive/folder where you extracted the Win98 Boot Files.
• Click on Start and follow the instructions.
  

6) Voila! You now have a very handy bootable pen drive. Go ahead and check to see if you can boot through this pen drive.

7) If you know how to boot using a pen drive, great. If you don’t, just refer the manual of your motherboard to see how to boot using a USB drive. Usually, this involves pressing the DEL key to enter the BIOS Setup Options and setting the First Boot Device to Removable.

Note1: The key required to enter the BIOS may be different depending on the make and model of your PC.

Note2: All or most of the recently manufactured/assembled systems have the option of pressing a key like ESC or F11 or F1 to access the Quick Boot menu. Just keep pressing any of these keys as soon as you have switched on your PC and check if you can get a Quick Boot menu. Select your pen drive from the list and hit Enter. You should be able to boot using your pen drive.

8) If you have booted successfully, you will see the DOS prompt C :\>

You have now learnt how to make pen drives bootable. In the next article, we will add useful utilities to your pen drive for day to day use.