USB bootable stick with cdrom support!!

[Cappie]

Seeing as everyone here is constantly whining about bugs in bioses and not having floppy drives anymore etc, I decided to make this short and very easy tutorial on how to make your USB stick into a flashing machine with cdrom support, ramdrive, etc. My previous tutorial still had the main problem of not having cdrom access.

'k here we go, first plug in your USB stick(make sure to backup any DATA still on the stick cuz this process will clear it completely). When thats done download this nifty tool,

BootDisk2BootStick

.NET framework is needed to run this tool, get that from here,

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 X86

or if you'r using 64bit windows,

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 X64

Then download this boot image,

MIRROR 1

Then all that remains is to run the bootstick tool,



go to the "Write to USBStick/Flash" tab, make sure it says "Floppy Disk-Image" as shown above, normally your USBStick's driveletter should already be selected, for me its drive G:\ which happens to be my last drive.

Then just click the START button and a screen will pop up asking you for a Bin-image(*.bin)file, so just browse to my downloaded one,



A warning will pop up notifying you that all data on that target drive will be lost, just click OK and you'll have a ready-for-booting USB stick(make sure ofcourse to change bootorder in bios, to boot from removable drive).

Let me know if it works for you.

PS : I assume most people will burn the biosfile and the biosflashtool on a cdrom which you can then access from DOS. When you do that, I suggest copying the flashtool and biosfile to RAMDRIVE before actually flashing bios. This will rule out any cd-hickups during flashing. When using my bootimage I believe ramdrive is Q:\ and cdrom is R:\, so supposing you burned following files to cdrom,

P5BD0711.ROM ----->> ASUS BIOSFILE(or other brand biosfile)
AFUDOS.exe ----->>> ASUS FLASHTOOL(or whatever other flashtool you need)

then all you type behind command prompt is,

copy R:\*.* Q:\

and files needed for flashing will be on ramdisk, then just traverse to RAMDISK by typing,

Q:\

and flash your bios from there.

You can never be too secure whilst flashing!!!

Note : When booting up from this stick you'll see a selection menu, take "Boot without emm386" here, cuz flashing with emm386 running in background is mucho bad!! Keep in mind, this method will not work if your motherboard does not detect USB devices at bootup.

Edited 31th july '07

[syne_24]

My board actually support bios flash from usb. You just copy the bios in the usb and it reads it like a hardrive from bios menu and flash it from there. But I guess this is good for those who dont have that option. Cuz I hate floppy myself..

[MTP04]

Rapidshare link expired.

Can you host it again?

[Okda]

and this needs to be posted @ the windows section and i would like it to be a sticky please

[Cappie]

Downloadlink is added again, lets hope it stays up this time, rapidshare sux.

[msgclb]

Downloadlink is added again, lets hope it stays up this time, rapidshare sux.

The top rapidshare link doesn't work. You probably need to set it to the new link.

EDIT: I just noticed you added it below the top post!

Now I only need to find a suitable USB stick!!

[MTP04]

Works great!

Thanks for sharing Cappie

[l0x]

WoW thanks so much for posting this.

[DAK1640]

Wow, I can't wait to try this...Thanks bunches

[phi|os]

This is sweet. My floppy drive is dead, and my EZ flash mechanism on my P5B seems to be a no go (I hear it's not a good method anyways). Thx again!

Edit: I'm a little confused though...the USB flash drive becomes bootable...so after this procedure is done, do we but afudos.exe and whatever bios we want to the drive?

[Cappie]

You can't add afudos and your bios to the USB stick cuz its simulating a floppy drive and only has 1.44Mb space available. After you used my method and you click on your USB stick and bring up the properties you'll see following screen,



and you'll see there's only 547Kb free space remaining, so this works best the way I explained it. Make the stick, also burn a cdr with those biosfiles(flashtool and bios), boot from the stick and copy the biosfiles from your burned cdr to the DOS ramdrive. My bootimage has support for all ATAPI cdrom devices, I assume most people have a cdrom so this really should be no problem.

[fornowagain]

Image links are dead.

[MAValpha]

Useful, but I'm missing something.

If your computer understands booting from USB in the first place, why not just use the Windows 9x/XP boot floppy to create a bootable flash drive (using HP's USB flash tool, for example) and load all of the BIOS files right onto it? I think I may still have the HP tool on one of my drives at home, if no one else does.
No CD needed, no extra hassles IMO.

Edit:
I can't install it at work to test, but I think this is it. If someone who has a floppy drive could make a copy of the boot disk and upload it, I think that should do the trick.

Edit2:
Yep, I'm pretty sure that's the right program.

[Killnine]

bad links. AGAIN.

>-=( what a pain in the ass.

[Cappie]

Now I hosted the file on my webserver, so it will stay online for as long as I stay with my provider!!

[Soulburner]

Useful, but I'm missing something.

If your computer understands booting from USB in the first place, why not just use the Windows 9x/XP boot floppy to create a bootable flash drive (using HP's USB flash tool, for example) and load all of the BIOS files right onto it? I think I may still have the HP tool on one of my drives at home, if no one else does.
No CD needed, no extra hassles IMO.

Edit:
I can't install it at work to test, but I think this is it. If someone who has a floppy drive could make a copy of the boot disk and upload it, I think that should do the trick.

Edit2:
Yep, I'm pretty sure that's the right program.

This helped me a lot. I just made my USB drive bootable with the HP program. This is all you need for flashing a BIOS from your USB drive.

However, since DOS cannot see NTFS drives, its nearly useless if you need to access any of your drives. Therefore, I used a utility from Avira called NTFS4DOS. This is even better than the HP utility since it gives you a fully functional DOS environment plus the ability access NTFS drives.

I have packed it all up here:

http://home.neb.rr.com/soulburner/US...20+%20NTFS.zip

1. Unzip the files.
2. If you do not need NTFS drive access, run the HP utility and point it to the DOS boot files I have included.
3. If you do need NTFS access, run the program "ntfs_h.exe".
4. In your BIOS you will need to change your Hard Disk boot order and put your USB HDD at the top of the list. That's how it is on my system at least.

Be aware that both of these programs will wipe your USB drive, so copy all of your data to a backup folder first.