Boot your computer with a Bootable USB drive

As long as your computer’s motherboard allows booting from USB devices, your system will quite happily start from a correctly formatted USB Bootable Drive, just as it would from a hard drive. As you would imagine, this fact has led to enterprising users putting all sorts of interesting programs and operating systems onto USB drives.

Previously, floppy disks were still essential troubleshooting tools, as they were the only device which could easily be used to ‘clean boot’ a PC into DOS (or a similar OS) for troubleshooting and BIOS update purposes. Now you can use your USB drive for the same things (provided your motherboard supports the feature). Let’s find out how.

Bios Setting

The first thing you need to make sure of is whether your motherboard’s BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) supports booting from a USB drive. Reboot your computer, pressing the ‘DEL’ key or “F12” several times as soon as the computer restarts. This should bring you to your system’s BIOS setup screen. Than configure the boot order as shown in the figure.
First make sure your USB is enabled

Now select USB as first boot device

There are number of BIOS brands and variations out there, it’s impossible to give a precise guide for this procedure, but this should give you the general idea. In most BIOS versions, you will need to go to the ‘advanced BIOS settings’ section and look for the ‘1st boot device’ entry or the equivalent. Cycle through the possible options in the BIOS. Ideally, you are looking for the USB RMD-FDD option. Failing this, try USB ZIP and USB FLOPPY. If it’s there, leave the entry set to it and save and exit to reboot your system.
If you can’t find that setting, look through the various BIOS settings for anything pertaining to USB devices, including DOS support and removable drives. Depending on your BIOS version you may want to look in the ‘feature settings’ or ‘advanced setup’ sections.
If you still can’t find anything relevant, your computer probably does not currently support this feature. All may not be lost though. The manufacturer may have added this feature with a BIOS update to your board. To check this, visit your motherboard manufacturer’s website and look for newer BIOS versions for your motherboard model.

Make the USB Bootable

Once you have set your motherboard to boot from the USB drive, it’s time to make the drive itself bootable.
The easiest way to do this is by using a floppy disk. If you have a floppy drive on your system, insert a blank disk and double click on ‘my computer.’ Right click the floppy drive and choose ‘format.’ Make sure the ‘create a bootable system disk’ option is checked. This will add the system files you need on your USB drive to the floppy. Click ‘ok’ to format the disk.
When the formatting process is finished, download the HP USB disk storage tool from here and install it . It is intended for HP removable drives, but we’ve found that it works just fine on every USB drive we tried. Using this software and the system files now contained on your floppy disk, you can make your USB drive bootable.
To do this, plug in your USB drive and run the HP USB disk storage tool.

Ensure that the tool has found the correct drive in the ‘device’ window. Change the file system to ‘FAT.’ Check the ‘create a DOS startup disk’ option, and in the ‘using DOS system files located at’ window, enter ‘a:\’ to point the program to your floppy disk. Now click ’start.’ The program will create the necessary boot files on your USB device.

Check Your Bootable USB Drive

Reboot your system (with the BIOS set to boot from the USB drive) to check that it works. If all goes well, your system should ‘clean boot’ to the A: prompt. You can now customize your new boot drive with whatever programs and utilities you need.
If you do not have a floppy drive, you can obtain the necessary boot files from here . Extract the zip file to a directory and point the HP USB disk storage tool to that directory for boot files.