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

Yes, but if your BIOS is able to emulate it as a floppy drive then DOS would see it as just another floppy drive surely.

First off your mobo must support booting from USB. I find this is usual called "USB-ZIP" or "USB-HDD" as Ramirez said under boot options. If it does your in luck. I got this to work a few months back with a Gigabyte board (modal escapes me) and a bog standard USB keychain (256mb). First, make a Win98 boot disk. Then dissconnect ALL hardrives and any other IDE devices for that matter. Connect your USB keycain and boot from the boot disk and your USB keychain should be listed as c: since you disconnected your IDE drives. Run fdisk from the boot disk (ensure you select the USB drive!) and make sure you disable large disk support(hence enabling FAT16) In fdisk, delete all partitions on the keychain and create a new one. Set it active. This is the main reason for unplugging all you IDE drives, so your pen drive will show up in DOS as C:. Making the pen drive active is the crucial step in creating a boot disk, without it, it's not a bootable drive. Exit Fdisk. Reboot from boot disk and format our new c: partition with "Format c: /s". Copy cdrom drivers, etc if you want later in windows. Now, when ever you connect your usbkeychain and power up your can boot from it. Useful for flashing BIOS with a system that has no floppy drive. Hope this helps. Edge

well.. if my MB wouldn't support booting from an USB stick, the MB would have to go but that's highly unlikely (since I've never had a bootable flashdrive I've never tried but I've seen some USB boot options in the BIOS). Lucky for me I have some w98 bootdisks (actually zip discs.. I have permbanned floppies from my house 4 years ago)

Syslinux works awesome for a bootloader, I've been testing it and now my USB drive boots as a Win98 disk, a DOS disk, and a Linux disk. You can find more info here: Just follow the instructions here: I only wish I had a 700mb+ USB drive, then I could put the Knoppix distro on it lol.

it doesn't fit very well here but just to let you know - I'd love to see your eyes grow... :) unfortunately in german but you will see and understand

Hmmmm.....gig and a half for 200 yoyos seems ok. I'll get that from Santa for Christmas :)

Have a look at this The interseting part is : " 2. Similar to a blank hard disk drive, the key must be partitioned (with an active partition), formatted, and a bootable operating system transferred to Memory Key. Any operating system that will fit on the available space offered on the Memory Key can be utilized. " I want something "unpossible", to boot WinXP Pro from USB memory stick. I have installed WinXP pro. Windows directory is slimmed down to 123 MB, but... How to transfer system to USB stick. NTFS?? Is this possible? Swap & HiberFile suppose can be on local HD, so it could be enough space to put this into 128 MB stick (maybe).

No idea what's wrong here but I can't boot from my memorystick. Using freedos, I managed to create a primary partition and format it, then I did a sys c: (my memory stick shows up as c:), copied all the other dos files I often use to the stick, then set my bios to boot from usb-hdd. While it recognized the stick, it can't boot from it, it automatically goes to the 2nd drive in the list. I'll see if it work on the two computers I have at work.

@ Doom9 , did you set it "active" ?