Creating a 1GB Bootable USB Flash Drive

Urban Reflex · 5 Jul 2008 at 23:22

On my old system, whenever I needed to play around with the BIOS, or anything like that, I would just use my trusty Windows ME start-up disk to boot into DOS. However, my new system does not have a floppy disk drive so I am in need of a replacement.

I've created a bootable USB flash drive using HP's drive key boot utility and the image of my old ME start-up disk. It works fine, no problems at all. However, I am limited to the 1.44MB partition that the HP utility creates, and this is all but useless if I want to flash the BIOS on my motherboard as I need about 3MB for the flashing utility alone.

What I want is a USB flash drive that boots like a Windows start-up disk but with a lot more space than a floppy drive's 1.44MB. Preferably I'd like the whole 1GB of the drive available so I can copy things easily and without hassle.

How can I achieve this guys?

Urban Reflex · 7 Jul 2008 at 14:21

I've tried everything you guys suggested. The HP tools only give me a 1.44MB disk, and when I reformat that with the HP Storage Format utility it doesn't boot at all.

Also, I probably should have been more specific, I'm not looking to boot into a Windows environment, I'm looking for something that'll allow me to boot to DOS and use fdisk / awdflash / etc without any problems.

I've tried several other programs as well, PeToUSB (excellent for wiping the MBR), FlashBoot, BootDisk2BootFlash (or whatever it's called) and nothing works. It seems to me that the easiest way to accomplish this is to use the HP Flash Boot utility to create a 1.44MB drive and the enlarge the partition without formatting. Is this possible? There's nothing in the boot sector that would still only limit the drive to 1.44MB is there?

Urban Reflex · 7 Jul 2008 at 21:29

ns400r said:
This - http://www.hiren.info/download/freeware/usb_format.zip
and this - http://selfdestruct.net/misc/usbboot/HPUSBFW_BOOTFILES.zip
Makes a large bootable USB drive.

When I do it this way, I get the full USB capacity with 320kb used, but no visible files on the drive. I tried pasting the files from the "HPUSBFW..." zip onto the drive and it asked me if I wanted to replace some files so they are evidently on there. Either way, my machine doesn't actually pick up the drive as being bootable.

.walls said:
::EDIT:: The verion I have of hpflash1.exe extracts and installs three files - one called HPUSBF.EXE, one called HPUSBFW.EXE and EULA.doc. It's version 2.00.006 A (6 Feb 04). I've just read that the newest one doesn't work as well.

If anyone is willing to host, I can upload the contents of the archive (it doesn't need to be installed) + the boot files.

I'm using the latest version of the program. My email address is urban_reflex[AT]very"hot"emailingwebsite.com if you can email them to me, I'll then be able to upload them for anyone else that needs them.

Urban Reflex · 8 Jul 2008 at 10:19

Okay, thanks walls, I got it to work. It doesn't boot automatically like if I use the HP Boot Utility, but if I press F8 during start up to access the boot menu I can select the drive from there and it works fine. I've uploaded the files here:

http://urbanreflex.uriptical.com/HP_Boot_USB.rar