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Creating a bootable thumb drive via Vista

SaltBoy

SaltBoy

Diamond Member
I'm looking to flash my bios but don't have a floppy drive. Can anybody point me to a guide that would *easily* allow me to quickly create a bootable thumb drive? I'm not looking for anything fancy - just a plain DOS-based OS would be perfect for me.

Also, all of the guides I've seen online so far make it seem like I have to jump through 20 different hoops in order to get things to work right. I think this shouldn't be too difficult to do. Anybody got any quick ideas?
 
Have you checked all the software that your mothervoard vendor provides? I unfortunately can't remember the exact details now, but my ASUS MB had a utility that set up the bootable flash drive for me (it booted right into the flash utility rather than a dos prompt, but all you want is to flash your BIOS, right?). Maybe your motherboard has a similar utility available on the setup disk or for download?
 
There is an HP utility you can download from their web site that can make your flash drive bootable. However, it runs on XP and not on Vista.

This is the only reference I have found to how to make a bootable flash drive on Vista.
Link
However, it is for a bootable Vista installation!

Even though I hate to do it, I flashed my BIOS using a utility from my motherboard manufacturer that I could run in Windows.

I would be very interested to find a solution also.
 
There is am alternative if you have a CD writer and a CDR or CD-RW and you have Nero.
You can use Nero to make the bootable data Cd and place the BIOS and the BIOS flash executable files on it.

This works sometimes!
It fails if the BIOS flash utility needs to write on the floppy.
 
you can go here:, but you have to it from a computer with vista already on it because in vista the diskpart program is version 6 and in windows xp it's 5 and it won't show the thumb drive as a disk.

if that is not what you are looking for, you can try here: bootdisk.com
 
There is actually another HP USB boot disk maker out there and it works in Vista. Just remember to run the app as Administrator.

I've uploaded it with some additional boot files here.
 
Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
There is actually another HP USB boot disk maker out there and it works in Vista. Just remember to run the app as Administrator.

I've uploaded it with some additional boot files here.
Click to expand...

Can you share where you got the tool from or at least the original name of it?
 
Originally posted by: Navid
Can you share where you got the tool from or at least the original name of it?
Click to expand...

"HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, V2.0.6" - screenshot

I can't remember where I got it from though. I too had the same problems making a USB drive bootable and ran across this and just saved it onto my HDD.
 
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