Booting from a USB flash drive (PenDrive, KeyChain, etc.)

Does anyone know if this can be done without specific manufacturer intended programs? I have a Gateway 128MB keychain drive that has absolutely no programs from the manufacturer for booting... I've seen some general procedures for flash drives on the internet, but cannot really find any concrete methods of booting this thing. Anyone have any ideas/experiences?

I have an ASUS P4P800 motherboard which gives you the option in the BIOS to use a flash drive in 1.44MB Floppy emulation mode (or something like that). So basically it sees your flash drive as a floppy and you can set as boot device according to manual. Only thing is I have no idea on how you would write a bootable image to usb flash drive ??? I imagine you would just write an image of the bootable stiffy to the usb media.

looks like I'm not the only one. I think you'd need a dos/win9x installation, do a "sys usbdriveletter:" and then select the proper device in your BIOS boot options (if it is supported.. chancer are still pretty high that it isn't). Since I don't have any wincrap installations anymore, and my dos bootdisk obviously being unable to access the usb flash drive I have so far not succeeded in making my usb stick bootable.

I tried using a DOS and a 9x bootdisk to do the sys usbdriveletter: thing, but that doesn't work for some reason, I think it has something to do with the partitions, going to mess around with it more today.

maybe I should try digging out old c't issues.. they had a "how to make your flash drive bootable" article based on linux (to format and copy the proper bootsector) a while back.

I finally figured it out. I used a bootable FreeDOS cd to run fdisk on the drive, delete the partition, make a new primary partition, and set it active. Then I booted a 98 disk and transfered it via sys driveletter: This was the only version of fdisk I could find that would function correctly. I tried the Linux route, and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, turns out Linux fdisk was making a 7GB partition (on a 128mb device). Instructions for the Linux way are available here:

First of all you need to make sure that your MB BIOS supports reboot either via USB-ZIP or USB-HDD mode (the majority of modern motherboards does support it) then use the Mformat utility to create USB-ZIP/HDD startup disk, (check your flash-Drive drivers CD)

btw I'm wondering, shouldn't there be a way to transfer the bootcode from an existing disc to another? I tried to put a bootable w9x floppy into my flashdrive using winimage but with no success whatsoever. I'm haveing some extremely negative feelings towards installing w98 on any of my computers and I have forced people around me to upgrade as well (you all know I'm a manic anti-legacyist ;)

Just boot with a Windows 9x disk that contains sys.com and type sys targetdriveletter: (Bootdisk.com has such disks)

don't you need dos drivers for your flashdrive so that it will even show up as drive letter in dos?