Win XP Bootable Flash Drive???

[Dr_Grimm]

Afternoon all. Well a few days ago I was given a working and in good condition Asus One net book, nothing fancy and it is in desperate need of a OS reinstall. I want to reformat and reinstall the Windows XP so that I can give it to my fiance's son for something to play around with. The only problem is there is no Cd-rom drive and I do not own an external one. I do have a couple questions pertaining to this situation. First is there a way I can create a windows bootable flash drive that I can reformat the computer with? If so, is there a way to create the boot drive from files off the computer or do I need to find a copy of Windows XP? And lastly if any of the the above is possible can you please point me in the direction of some reading material on it so that I can learn to do it, any and all information would be greatly appreciated. And thank you all for your help, hopefully in my travels around the forum I can help one of you.

 

[Harvey]

Searching Google for install xp from flash drive finds some possibly good links, including this discussion on Tom's Hardware forums.

Hope that helps. 🙂

 

[John Connor]

Unfortunately I don't know how you can pull the current installation onto a USB drive without doing a clone.

If you have a copy of XP and another computer with an optical drive check this out. http://wintoflash.com/home/en/

I bought an external optical drive on eBay for little to nothing. That is an option, it's how you install an OS to a netbook.

 

[88keys]

YUMI

It's what I use and it works great for Windows XP, 7 and 8.

It's probably the easiest and best way to install OSes from flash media. It's so good that I won't be purchasing optical drives for any future builds.

I also heard that it's good for installing Linux Distros.

 

[John Connor]

It's probably the easiest and best way to install OSes from flash media. It's so good that I won't be purchasing optical drives for any future builds.

I don't understand. You still need a optical drive to read the OS disk...

 

[88keys]

But if you have an external optical drive or one on another machine you can write the disc to an iso and then write the iso to bootable USB flash via YUMI.

I keep my installation discs in ISO format on my NAS, and I'll still keep an external optical drive around because they will be occasionally necessary, but not everyday.

You should be good to go so long you have one rig with an optical drive and a USB key.

Of course the rig your installing the OS on needs to support booting from USB which should be the case for anything made in the last several years. Especially if there is no on board optical drive.