USB pen boot

**kitbag** · 17th August 2006

i've not tried this but seen it mentioned that booting form a USB pen drive is possible.

is there an easy way to get this to work? is it like just formatting the USB drive with system files, when booted will it give access to SATA drives on the system, as i have a boot CD and it dosen't support SATA(it's old) i've downloaded a new CD image from a torrent site but not burnt it yet.

at the mo i don't have any problems but was going to make drive back ups so i could do a complete recovery and thought it would be easier if i could boot to USB. Also it would be handy if any diagnostics were required

any advice on this would be good like what software? how big does the USB drive have to be? will this also boot from a USB hard drive or only a pen?

i have 2 dell machines bought this year and a nealy 3 year old samsung laptop (that cost more than both dell machines put together

) running XP home on laptop MCE on one dell and not sure about the other could be XP pro or home i need to check

its running xp pro i checked

i hope this is enough info to get some advice on this thanks in advance.

**Mule** · 17th August 2006

The USB pen can be any size since the boot files required are only a few k. If your machine allows you to boot from USB then there should be an option in the BIOS to select it as a boot device.

**{{909}}** · 17th August 2006

a little tip i found that is probaby totally useless to most people, my bios didnt have any options for Boot from USB in the boot list, plus the specs and manual didnt mention it either, after 2 days of messing about i found that if i set my pc to just boot from the HDD as normal and i didnt have any HDDs in, just the usb stick with boot files on, then it worked!