USB thumbdrives are great. They are cheap, small devices packed with a lot of storage to carry all your important stuff. They are also great to boot administrative tools like True Image etc.
On themudcrab there is a great article for those who want to boot ISOs directly from a USB thumbdrive.
Unfortunately the article does not describe one major aspect: Making the stick itself bootable.
You need a little bit of extra software here to make it happen, thankfully the download is small and the software is free.
- Download and install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.
As I wrote, by default most thumbdrives do not have the bootable flag set. Also, they don’t have an MBR written. If you would try to install Grub4DOS on such a thumbdrive it would moan about an invalid partition table and recommend to use the –skip-mbr-check parameter.
That’s where HP’s tool comes in: Pop in your thumbdrive, start the HP tool and format the stick. The tool will write the necessary portions to the MBR, effectively making it possible to boot off the thumbdrive.
Done? Then follow the great guide on themudcrab showing all the necessary steps from now on. It even has the right software set as an example 🙂 .
Great hint! I was afraid my flash drive wouldn’t work fine with grub, but that tool made it compatible!