HOW TO: Making a USB Thumbdrive Bootable
Sunday, September 28, 2008 by Supergroverohp | Discussion: PC Hardware
Figured I might as well port this over, I am sure someone will find it usefull here. The original is in the external link.
First in the series is Making that USB Thumbdrive good for more than storing you're data, after making the drive bootable you will be able to for instance run Memtest86+ or say a BIOS flash off of the Thumbdrive rather than using you're old Floppy drive.
So prepare to throw you're old floppy drive out the window!
Well that maybe a bit hasty.
First of you will need This little Program.
Save it to you're desktop.
You'll need winrar to unpack the file, but I am sure everyone has it.
Once it is uncompressed you can put the folder wherever you want it.
Then run HPUSBFW.
Make sure the Device listed is your ThumbDrive you plan to use.
Then make sure the file system is "FAT", and check the box that says create a DOS startup disk. The gray box should turn white, make sure you have "using DOS system files located at" box checked.
Press the browse button and point it to the folder called "usbimage" in the DriveKey folder.
Format means ERASE, so you will lose all the data on your drive.
Once thats done, your thumbdrive is now bootable!
You can now load you ThumbDrive with whatever bootable programs you want.
Now when you're ready to boot off the drive, go into your bios, by holding the delete button when you turn the computer on, or reboot it.
-In the bios, make sure your boot priority is set so your first boot device is your USB Thumbdrive. It will be represented as a hdd
Reply #2 Tuesday, September 30, 2008 7:16 PM
I only keep my floppy drives for users that have not thrown theirs away. 
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Reply #1 Tuesday, September 30, 2008 9:20 AM
there is a freeware tool that does it for you, just run it and click the "make bootable" button... don't recall its name off the top of my head though.