Windows XP on a bootable USB Flash drive

Have you upgraded to a 1GB USB flash drive and have an old 256MB or 512MB gathering dust in a drawer? Why not load a bootable copy of Windows XP on to it? You've been able to boot Linux off a USB flash drive for a while now, but this is the first I've seen for Windows XP. And it's accomplished using Bart's PE Builder. Too cool.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050909/index.html

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Comments

Ricka182

That is cool....

RussS

Yup, a way cool tool. Unfortunately I still have many clients with older machines that don't boot to USB so my PE CR still does the bulk of the work.

johnnynodough

Very cool, I currently have mine bootable with the greatest MS OS of all time...DOS 6.22

Plantwiz

Very cool.

I was thinking of upgrading to a 1GB drive, unfortunately, my 'old' one is 128MB

Maybe I'll get a 512MB and a 1GB

JDMurray

RussS wrote:

Yup, a way cool tool. Unfortunately I still have many clients with older machines that don't boot to USB so my PE CR still does the bulk of the work.

Yes, good point. The machine's BIOS/CMOS must support bootable USB devices for it to be of any use. That leaves out most mobos older than what, two years?

Anyone know when bootable USB devices were first supported on what manufacturer's motherboards? Betcha ASUS came out with it first.

Plantwiz

jdmurray wrote:

Anyone know when bootable USB devices were first supported on what manufacturer's motherboards? Betcha ASUS came out with it first.

My Epox 8KHA+ has it and I bought that in Nov/Dec 2001.

JDMurray

Plantwiz wrote:

jdmurray wrote:

Anyone know when bootable USB devices were first supported on what manufacturer's motherboards? Betcha ASUS came out with it first.

My Epox 8KHA+ has it and I bought that in Nov/Dec 2001.

Ah, that old? Bootable USB has been around (at least) that long because of USB floppy drives, I bet.

Plantwiz

Could be??

I just remember it was my last chance to 'invest' in computer hardware prior to getting married

Not many boards had it back then, and of all the boards we sold, I believe it was the only one...not to say others didn't, but the stock models we had at the time did not.

RussS

My Abit BTX133 was USB bootable - that was about 2001 when I build that one.

shadown7

Thanks for the awesome link!! That will come in handy at work!

mobri09

Thanks for the update, I am going to give this a shot now. Webmaster should consider a forum directed towards current pc news, media, updates, projects, diy, and more? thats just a thought?

JDMurray

mobri09 wrote:

Webmaster should consider a forum directed towards current pc news, media, updates, projects, diy, and more? thats just a thought?

For cool and new hardware I monitor the following sites (does anyone have others?):

www.extremetech.com

www.tomshardware.com

www.pcemag.com

www.digg.com

hardware.slashdot.org

www.makezine.com

neo468

Is there a way to image an existing drive to the usb? I know the usb uses a compressed format, but as the admin think of all the hours saved in scrambling to redo a machine thats down. the only prob is the limit of 1gb

Plantwiz

neo468 wrote:

Is there a way to image an existing drive to the usb? I know the usb uses a compressed format, but as the admin think of all the hours saved in scrambling to redo a machine thats down. the only prob is the limit of 1gb

Well, if you wanted to go this route....

Use a USB HDD Caddy (holds a notebook HDD and is still portable) or use one of the Maxtor OneTouch USB HDD - I believe those are up to 300GB+ Now.

Plus GHOST or some other imaging software. So, yes you can do this to USB if you really want.

Biggest hurdle will still fall to your BIOS and boot order.

johnnynodough

Having a USB key containing an image wouldnt be that practical really, considering the options that PlantWiz pointed out. Besides, in most environments you will just reimage a machine over the network, or the older school way of spanned CD's or a DVD. I cant recall the last time I had to rebuild a machine from scratch. When we get a new line of desktops,laptops, or servers we build one image per line of business per device type, and thats it.

JDMurray

The latest issue (Oct/Nov 05) of PC Enthusiast Magazine (www.pcemag.com) has an article reviewing six USB flash drives. It looks like the Kingston DataTraveler Elite (1GB, 2GB) is the best choice for access speed, CPU load, and available software utilities. It's on the high-end price-wise (at newegg.com $92 1GB, $157 2GB).

http://www.kingston.com/digitalmedia/dt_elite.asp?tabs=ds

roninmagik1

Another cool website for tech stuff is

anandtech.com

That and tomshardware started me on the road to geekdom!

mobri09

Just installed XP on my 512mb flash drive, It's amazing!
The directions were right on target...just follow and read carefully.
good post

TheShadow

I used to search all the sites until I discovered the following. You can do one stop shopping by making www.dailyrotation.com your home page. This is the top aggregation site on the web and will take the RSS feeds from all the sites mentioned so far. The lists of sites is amazing and you simply pick the ones you want. It will give their headlines and you simply click on it and go right to the real site and article. As new site are deemed worthy to be added they are listed at the top and you can choose to add them to your custom list. You can also get what they consider the top ten headlines of the day from all the sites. I get to scan tech, legal, industry watch, software, etc. and know what is going on today within five minutes.

JDMurray

TheShadow wrote:

I used to search all the sites until I discovered the following. You can do one stop shopping by making www.dailyrotation.com your home page.

Thanks, that is a very useful site! I wish that I had thought of it myself.

Now I just need to figure out how to automatically pick up specific RSS feeds and display then on my web site for myself and other to use. There must be web site software specifically for that.