Bootable USB Flash drives

[spc-rocket]

Hi Guys,

 

Do you recommend any bootable USB flash drives, ideally should be able to do USB-FDD, USB-ZIP or any that can be made to be bootable. Looking for about 10-15 of these for building stations and would be like to pay no more than £12 if possible.

 

Just sick and tired of using Floppy disks - toooo slooooooow!!

 

TIA,

 

Ashok.

[ChrisH]

Get any USB pen drive and use the HP utility that works on any thats listed in the wiki essential software to make it bootable or use a windows 95 book disk and the sys command.

[Norphy]

What he said

 

Just make sure that the PC supports booting from USB devices. We have a few that don't (Old PIII i815e based PCs)

[ChrisH]

Yup I have 60 odd machines that dont support USB booting or PXE and dont have any optical or floppy drives in them. They are the bain of my life and finally about to be replaced /rant off

[spc-rocket]

Good stuff guys!

 

I'll check out the HP utility and see if that works. Luckly all the PCs we have do support the booting from USB as i've checked this already.

 

Ash.

[Geoff]

i815e based PCs

 

Worst Chipset Ever! I HATE IT! I HATE IT! I HATE IT!

[Norphy]

Why? The only bad thing about it as far as I can see is that it doesn't support more than 512MB RAM. For a long time it was the only decent 133MHz SD-RAM chipset out there for the PIII. The VIA equivalents were crap, i820 was a disaster and i810 couldn't support external graphics cards.

[Geoff]

Its allergic to single sided ram (ie, all that you can get these days) so I have a room full I can't upgrade past 128mb.

[spc-rocket]

Right guys,

 

I have tried the HP utlity and this didn't work with the Kingston data traveller II 512mb flash drive.

 

Any other methods or have i just been dumb and didn't try it correctly. If anyone's got an idots guide on this kind of thing then please forward the links or docs.

 

We have the netac triple boot and they are working fine but don't want to spend £20 per drive.

 

TIA,

 

Ashok.

[Norphy]

Its allergic to single sided ram (ie, all that you can get these days) so I have a room full I can't upgrade past 128mb.

 

Ah

 

Ironically enough we have a similar problem. We bought a whole load of 128MB DIMMs for our 815 based boards which had four chips on. They didn't like them, only saw them as 64MB. So we went around the whole bloody school scavenging boards from PCs that would take the new ones. Fun :|

 

Ashok, the utility worked for us using Kingston Data Traveller IIs, albeit the 256MB ones. All I can suggest is to try again. Or get Crucial Gizmos, I know those work as well.

[ChrisH]

Windows 95 boot disk and use the sys command or you could probably use a knoppix CD. You just have to find a computer that supports the USB well enough. I had machines that supported USB booting but didnt let me see the drive but others did.

[john]

Ah

 

Ironically enough we have a similar problem. We bought a whole load of 128MB DIMMs for our 815 based boards which had four chips on. They didn't like them, only saw them as 64MB. So we went around the whole bloody school scavenging boards from PCs that would take the new ones. Fun :|

 

Been there done that, got the t-shirt, the cuts from the cheap nasty steel cases etc... CCL were excellent about it though, very good on the returns and helpfully. Just got to help people another school with identical machines to those I did 3 years ago do the same thing, upgrade to 256 or 512mb so they will run XP for a while! I can see the fun already!

[spc-rocket]

Norphy,

 

I'll give the 256mb version a go and see what happens. The situation for us is that we need to copy the good old RM build disk data to the usb so we can re build stations.

 

I used the HP utility to format the drive (Data traveller II) 512 mb and then i copied all the files from the floppy disk (RM build disk) to the driver but it didn't work. I tried the USB-FDD and also the USB-ZIP but no luck.

 

I'll give the 256mb a try.

 

Ashok.

[CyberNerd]

This firm: http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/ sells IDE flash drives , Ideal if they don't need to be removed.

[thom]

Getting back to the Bootable USB topic, I am having the same problem.

 

We use ghost to image our machines. This involves booting from a floppy disk to access the server in DOS and then run ghost. At first we used a different floppy disk fo each NIC. This was a pain as we had about 12 different NICs in all our machines. I then found the Universal TCP/IP boot disk which was a godsend as I can use that for any NIC http://www.netbootdisk.com/.

 

I tried using the HP utility to copy it to a USB drive but I never managed to get that to work either.

 

I then found this guide http://www.netbootdisk.com/usb_boot.htm which explains the difficulties invoved. I haven't followed it yet to see if it works but will do soon. We are getting 70 new PCs without floppy drives so I have my fingers crossed!

[thom]

I got it working!

 

1) You need to format a floppy as an XP MSDOS startup disk.

2) Run the HP tool (http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html) to make the USB drive bootable.

3) Copy all files from the floppy (including hidden files) to the USB drive (do NOT overwrite existing files on USB)

4) then use netbootdisk (http://www.netbootdisk.com/) to make it actually work. This involves modifying the MakeDisk.bat to find the USB's drive letter as opposed to A:\. By modifying Logon.bat to run ghost from a network share!

 

It works great and is a lot faster than a floppy! Now all i need to do is work out the command line to run ghost, load a specefic image file and then restart and my life will be complete (well, almost ).

[Geoff]

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/pfdocs/1998082612540625

[thom]

Thanks for that, I am now a fuller person!

[luke213]

The HP Tool is no longer available on the HP website. Can anyone send it to me or put it in the downloads section.

 

Thanks

[Geoff]

Here's a mirror.

 

http://www.down911.com/SoftView/SoftView_2705.html

 

Hope you can read Chinese.

[luke213]

Thanks works a treat!!!

[luke213]

I have been using the USB stick to boot most of the computers fine, however some are telling me that there is a "Missing Operating System" or "Error Loading Operating System" when I try to boot them from the USB drive.

 

Looked in the BIOS and have enabled all the USB booting options, including setting it as the Primary and only boot device.

 

Can anyone help!!!!!!

[Geoff]

Flash the bios?

[luke213]

Tried that, but it doesn't work?

[sahmeepee]

OK, serious bonus points for someone that can give me a good method for booting off a USB pen (easy part) then accessing files on a USB hard drive at USB 2 speeds. I'm thinking for easy non-network ghosting.

 

Super mega bonus points if you can do this with NTFS on the USB hard drive (ntfsdos might do that part)