Flash Drive Bootable Software

[Rachelle Shriver]

Auser may want to create a bootable USB flash drive which has a larger partition than the maximum 2 GB created using the Dell Diagnostic Distribution Package (DDDP), see Article How to Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive using Dell Diagnostic Deployment Package (DDDP).

xcopy switches are as follows:

/s - Copies directories and subdirectories except empty ones.

/h - Copies hidden and system files.

/f - Displays full source and destination filenames while copying.

To display the full list of switches, type xcopy /?

You can create a bootable USB flash drive to use to deploy Windows Server Essentials. The first step is to prepare the USB flash drive by using DiskPart, which is a command-line utility. For information about DiskPart, see DiskPart Command-Line Options.

In the new command line window that opens, to determine the USB flash drive number or drive letter, at the command prompt, type list disk, and then click ENTER. The list disk command displays all the disks on the computer. Note the drive number or drive letter of the USB flash drive.

If your server platform supports Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), you should format the USB flash drive as FAT32 rather than as NTFS. To format the partition as FAT32, type format fs=fat32 quick, and then click ENTER.

Get RMPrepUSB Here: RMPrepUSB download latest version (fosshub.com)

Get the Dos6.22 IMG file from here as you already did.

With RMPrepUSB (I'm using v.2.1.739) select File->Drive.

Go through the prompts and let it put all the files from the ISO onto the USB stick.

Copy ALL the files on the USB stick to somewhere on your hard drive (these should be the only files in the folder).

"In the Copy OS files from here" section, put the folder that you just copied all the files from the USB stick to.

In Sec.3 select MS-DOS bootable.

In Sec.4 select FAT16 on the left, and "Boot as HDD" and "Use 64hd"**

(Make sure the checkbox next to "5 Copy OS files" is checked)

Select 6 Prepare Drive and follow the prompts. It will partition, format, MBR, bootsector and copy the files to the USB stick.

When 9. is complete, hit Eject Drive and remove USB stick.

That's it! Let me know if it works for you.

Note: I think the problem with just doing the File->Drive thing is that it doesn't put the files in the right place on the USB stick. When you let it prep and copy the files itself, it puts everything in the proper place and order.

** You may have to monkey with the checkboxes in this section. My laptop places the USB Boot under its "Hard Drive" section when it lists it in its BIOS. Your computer may consider it removable storage, or a FDD.

More specifically, I want to know if when I put the Ubuntu OS on my flash drive if it is permanent or not. As in,can I delete the Ubuntu installation files after I install it on my computer and use it as a regular USB again? I just want to install Ubuntu on a unformatted hard drive and then be able to use my USB like normal again.

You really need another way to boot computer to make repairs or in an emergency. If not at home and system crashes a live flash drive install can let you keep working and probably access data on drive. Without a repair tool you are out of luck.

Also if you use the dd procedure to create flash drive you have to use dd to zero out MBR as the dd procedure does not create a standard MBR,only then can your create a new partition table and formatted partitions.

Unfortunately that's not my experience. It seems that most flashdrives (including Kingston) can be made bootable once, and they will work OK, but the problem comes when you try to reformat them ready for burning a new .iso on to them. I've destroyed two flashdrives this way; something (but I'm not sure what) happens to their boot sector and they become read-only and can't be reformatted. I've tried a whole host of different tools to try and resurrect them without success.

I've posted some details of all this at this tomshardware page. It seems that the boot sectors on different flashdrives are all different and proprietary, and they react in different ways to having an .iso burned on them. Some people have reported they've been able to successfully reformat and re-burn new .iso's on to their flashdrives, so I know it's possible to do this with some brands, but I need to know which ones. Before anyone burns an .iso on to a flashdrive, they should find out what brands allow this process to be recycleable and which ones don't.

If anyone has info on this branding issue, please post it on the above tomshardware url or e-mail me directly on [email protected]. Meanwhile I'm trying to find out which flashdrive brands support making them bootable, and which ones don't. especially since I've discovered the hard way that Kingston don't.

This is not true, I used a generic 8 Gb flash drive as a boot for Kali and the space it took is not able to reformat, I've tried everything I've found online to remedy this and its stuck. I tried reformatting and making it a Ubuntu drive and it just boots to Kali again. So it appears I'm stuck with a Kali boot USB drive...

In most cases, all using a USB drive as a boot media does is reformat the drive to a normal file system, add a bootloader and copy files over. In most cases the drive's FAT32 which is pretty universal.

If you never intend to have the drive plugged in at boot, or your system dosen't have USB drives on top of its boot order, simply deleting all the files will sufface. Otherwise simply reformat the drive to your preferred filesystem.

Yes. Normally I create a primary partition on my usb and make it bootable. If you do that then you better reformat it again but if you just use a bootloader you can just delete it from your usb and use it as a regular usb.

I am a Windows user, and I have met with this situation frequently.To revert back the pendrive to normal state, i.e., even when formatting the pendrive does nothing and the entire disk space is reduced to few MBs,then you need

I'm trying to create a bootable USB drive for 20.04. If I do a 20.04 downloaded image, I can boot the drive properly. However, if I extract all the 20.04 content to a directory, then recreate the ISO and dd that to the drive, the resulting drive won't boot. My zbook just beeps and goes back to the boot menu. The command for creating the ISO I got from several articles. But I'm certain it has to be the created ISO itself. Any ideas?

tl;dr When you recreate the ISO from the extracted files, you are not (correctly) transferring either the BIOS bootblock, nor the EFI System Partition, or ESP, to the newly created USB drive. Therefore, the system will not be able to boot from this disk.

The system firmware does not to know how to boot the operating system on the drive, and instead passes on that responsibility to a small program called the bootloader. It is stored on the disk in a specified location where the firmware can find it easily. The location where the bootloader is stored is dependent on the method used by the firmware to boot the disk. There are two different boot methods in use today on x86-64 platforms, the modern EFI and legacy BIOS boot.

I assume your HP Z-Book is new enough to be both x86-64, and support EFI boot. You will be able to enable legacy BIOS support in the system firmware's setup utility, though this may differ on other laptops, and could be subject to change for newer laptops.

x86-64 EFI-based firmware loads the bootloader by looking for a file called /efi/boot/bootx64.efi (case does not matter) on a special, FAT32-formatted partition with type 0xEF or EFI System Partition (ESP) on the selected boot disk. Some BIOSes can (apparently) also boot from NTFS file systems.

Most Linux distributions, Ubuntu included, now distribute an El Torrito-compliant disk image. This means the same disk can be booted by a legacy BIOS, or modern EFI-based firmware, in their respective boot modes. When you extract or mount the disk (i.e. from GNOME Files, the file manager), the EFI partition is maintained as a separate efi.img file, but this is actually not how the disk is arranged on a CD/DVD burned from this ISO file.

Therefore, the system firmware does not recognise this file as a valid EFI System Partition when it is copied to your USB drive. The drive is rejected by the firmware, because it does not believe the disk to be bootable.

The rest of the ISO may be extracted to the same partition, and this is what tools such as Rufus does. However, an extra step is often required for most Linux distributions: the file system label is often used to identify the disk from which to boot, and therefore, the file system's label must match that which came on the ISO file. Otherwise (with, for example, Ubuntu), the kernel will not be able to locate the SquashFS root file system to continue booting.

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