USB flash memory drives are popular for transporting files between computers. These removable storage devices, also known as 'thumb' or keychain drives, are small, highly portable and inexpensive, making them good floppy diskette replacements.

One of the most useful, but least well-known things you can do with a USB flash drive is to make it bootable from DOS. In other words, you can start up a computer from a flash drive, using the flash drive as if it were a floppy disk. With a bootable flash drive, you can run Symantec Ghost or various command-line recovery tools.

1. A bootable MS-DOS floppy diskette. For lots of reasons, including long filename support, the best DOS boot floppy is one based on Windows 98SE. If you don't have one, there is a great site named www.bootdisk.com, where you can get a self-extracting copy of a Windows 98SE DOS floppy.
2. HP's "USB Disk Storage Format Tool". It works with most standard flash drives. Download the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.

1. Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool on your computer.
2. Insert the flash drive into a USB port. Make sure that the drive appears in My Computer.
3. If you have any important files on the flash drive, copy them to a safe location. The flash drive will be erased and formatted.
4. Put the bootable DOS diskette in the floppy drive.
5. Double-click on the Desktop icon "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool".
6. In the Device box, make sure that the flash drive is selected (this is important if you have another USB storage device attached to your computer).
7. In the Format options box, select "Quick Format".
8. In the Format options box, select "Create a DOS startup disk".
9. In the "using DOS system files located at:" box, select the floppy drive (3½ Floppy A:)
10. Click the Start button.

All Dell OptiPlex computers, starting with the GX270, and the Latitude D series notebooks can be booted from a USB flash drive. Some computers, including the earliest GX260s, need an updated system BIOS is order to get USB boot support. When the computer starts, press F12 to get the boot menu. Select the USB device from the menu.

• Set up a DOS boot menu in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, so that you can have multiple driver configurations. Example: Symantec Ghost requires a lot of memory, so you would load only mininal drivers. For instructions on how to do this, Google DOS Boot Menu
• Put Dell's 32-Bit Diagnostics on the drive.
• Get a copy of the free utility NTFS Reader for DOS. Very useful for copying files from a crashed Windows system. If you have NTFS Reader on a flash drive, you'll be prepared when the day comes that you have to find a way to get an important file from a system that won't start up in Windows.

Posted: 12/27/04
Updated: 12/25/07