boot from usb memory drive

[imported_stev]

I bought my machine without a floppy drive, hoping that I could finally be rid of that old and, except for its booting ability, completely useless technology. However, I didn't know that it was going to be so much of a pain to get my USB memory drive to be bootable.

My motherboard is MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum and my USB drive is a 512 mb SanDisk Cruzer Micro.

When I go into the bios with the usb drive plugged in, I select "Hard Disk" to be the boot device. Then, I go to "Hard Disk Boot Priority" and select "USB-HDD0: SanDisk Cruzer Micro 0.2" as the first priority drive. When I try to boot, it gives me the error "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". I also tried setting the primary boot device as "USB-FDD", USB-ZIP", and "USB-CDROM" and it simply skips over them, as expected.

It seems that it wouldn't give this error unless it tried to boot from the usb drive, so I think the bios settings are fine, but there's something wrong with the formatting or the files I put on the drive. I've been placing "ntldr" and "NTDETECT.COM" on the drive and I've tried formatting as NTFS, FAT32, and FAT and I get the same outcome. I've tried putting these files on a floppy disk in my laptop and it boots just fine.

I've gone to this site and tried the instructions given under the comment "Quick and easy - err well I thought so until I typed the directions...", but I was never able to select the USB partition as active (the option was grayed out). There are other options out there that I haven't tried, but they involve various utilities, which seems very unnecessary to me, especially when some claim to have been successful without them and some can't even get the utilities to work.

Anyone have any idea how I can boot from my USB memory drive? I really want to figure this out before I ever need to do such a thing!

 

[Doctorweir]

Did you format it using the HP tool? I have a stick formatted with the Win98-version of the tool...works great.
Have to try the XP version...thanks for the link

 

[grappa]

You might also try putting a PE environment on it... try BartPE at http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ ... do a search for pe2usb to format a flash drive to boot with the PE environment. Besides having lots of useful utilities, it has a working XP kernel you can use to access your filesystem, and there are many plug-ins you can add to give you access to disk partitioning, registry editing, etc.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, When you format the USB drive you should check COPY SYSTEM FILES to make it bootable. If already formated you could use format, but check COPY SYSTEM FILES ONLY. DOS Format would be FORMAT X: /S. If already formated use SYS X: Hope this helps, Jim

 

[imported_stev]

Thanks for all the replies! I'll try these things out tonight and report back.

 

[imported_stev]

Doctorweir: I tried the HP Formatting Tool and it worked fine. I chose a directory containg startup disk files copied from a floppy, changed the boot settings in the bios (they won't retain the USB drive in the hard drive boot list), and it ended up showing the C prompt. Strangely it said Windows Millennium at the top, but the computer I made the disk with runs XP and before that it ran Windows 2000.

JimPhelpsMI: Where do you find this "COPY SYSTEM FILES" option? If you mean the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" on the format page, it's grayed out. As for the commands you gave, I tried those out in the command prompt (assuming "X" meant the drive letter of the USB drive) and I received errors, such as "sys" not being recognized and "\S" being an invalid parameter.

I ran out of time for trying BartPE, but it looks really promising. I hope to check it out tomorrow along with any responses to the above. Thanks for your help!

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Answer was generic. If you have a FORMAT option (right click the drive, click Format), it would have been there. If you know how to get to real DOS that should have worked, but it's standard slash (/) not back slash (\). Sorry it was no help, but sounds like you got it anyway. There are many ways to format a disk some usually come with and load with the OS, you found an external one that worked. Jim

 

[imported_stev]

I finally tried BartPE. It looks pretty good, but when loaded onto a USB flash drive, it takes awhile to load. Burning it onto a CD as it was originally intended is quicker, so I guess I'll do that. It's certainly the boot utility of the next generation.