Hey y'all, check this out.

[kenboyles72]

Creating A Bootable USB Flash Drive or Jumpdrive

Requirements:
A computer with a BIOS that allows for booting from a USB port.
I used a Gigabyte GA-8S661FXM that has Chipset SiS SiS661FX a bootable floppy disk or CD.
I used a Windows 98 bootdisk.

I used the DOS FDISK and FORMAT that are on the bootdisk.
Of course, the USB drive that you want to make bootable
I used a Lexar 128 Jumpdrive.

Directions
1. Make the USB drive the first in the drive sequence.
Why?? fdisk does not allow for a partition to be set as ACTIVE (bootable) unless it is the first drive. It is most likely

that your hard drive(s) is set as the first drive. This needs to be changed.
How?? Setting your USB drive to be the first in the drive sequence can be done by following ONE of the methods below. No matter which method you follow, the computer MUST be booted with the USB drive plugged in into the computer. Take a note of how the options that you are about to change were set before, as they will need to be changed back later.

The easiest way is to disable your hard drives from bios, or unplug them so bios won't recognize them.

2. Boot the computer from the boot floppy/CD into the command prompt with the USB Drive plugged in.

3. Run fdisk

Use fdisk's "Set Active Partition" (option 2) to set the primary partition on the USB Drive to ACTIVE.
This step assumes that a primary partition already exists on the USB Drive. If this is not the case, use fdisk to create one.
As noted in step # 1, fdisk will not allow for setting the the partition to ACTIVE unless the drive the partition is on is

the FIRST in the drive sequence.

4. Exit fdisk.

5. Reboot the computer from boot floppy/CD into the command prompt with the USB Drive plugged in.
At the command prompt enter the following command: dir c:

This step is just to verify that the C: drive is actually the primary partition on the USB Drive. Regardless of the result

that the command generates whether it be a listing of files or an error message, what is important here is to make sure that

the size of the primary partition on the USB Drive is roughly equal to the sum of the empty space and the used space.
Format and copy the boot files to the primary partition.

At the command prompt, from the directory where FORMAT.COM is located, enter:format /s c:
Run fdisk /mbr

"fdisk /mbr" writes the master boot record, in this case to the USB drive, without altering the partition table information.
Restart the computer and choose booting from the USB Drive. If all goes well, you should see a C:> command prompt.
Change the computer settings back to what they were before step # 1.

[mazdarx7-64]

After this will the PC boot without the usb drive in it? Also why not just copy you existing boot disk to the usb drive then set the bios to boot from USB when you need to use it?

[kenboyles72]

yes, after setting your bios back to its original state, remove the usb device and it will boot normally. if your board and bios supports boot from usb, then you can change your boot sequence to boot from a usb device. a flashdrive or jumpdrive would be considered a usb hd. the reason you have to go through these steps to make the usb device bootable, is because it doesn't have mbr on it. its like trying to put blank floppy in and trying to boot from that, it won't work. flashdisks and jumpdrives are small hd's and need to be fdisk'd to have an active partition and mbr for it to be able to boot. being able to boot from a jumpdrive or flasdrive has an advantage over floppies, such as disk space. you can put a whole lot more utilities on a usb device.