Bootable DOS USB Flash Drive + Booting ISOs with Grub 4 Dos

Tagged: usb tutorials hardware
Introduction

So you just got your new computer from Dell, HP, etc. and for some reason who knows what you need to boot from a boot disk. AHHHH WTF!!! They didn’t install a floppy drive on my computer. That is ok because you have come to the right place. I am going to show you how to turn your USB Flash Drive into a boot disk (they come with many new computers instead of floppy drives)
Get the Stuff

For this tutorial there are some things you will need to have:
USB Flash Drive
HP USB Flash Drive Format Tool Mirror 1 Mirror 2 (Password for mirrors is "pasta")
Win98 Boot Disk or the Files -> You can use the ones from Windows Millenium also.
Some of these Programs (makes the disk more useful)

Getting it Ready
After downloading the HP Format Tool install it. Get your boot disk or the downloadable files and copy/extract them to a folder on your HD. Make sure anything on your USB Drive is backed up because we are going to format it...
Make it Bootable
Open the HP Format ToolStart/Programs/Hewlett-Packard Company/HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

It should automatically select your USB Drive.
Select FAT32 or FAT Under File System.
Select Create a DOS startup disk
Select using DOS system files located at and point to the folder containing the boot disk files.
Then click Start

Now you have a USB PEN that works like a "DOS floppy startup disk", like the ones created by Windows 98 and Windows ME, were you could execute several, dos tools, basically disaster recovery tools.



Add Some More Stuff
As is your new boot disk can’t do much other than boot the computer to DOS so you need to add other programs to make it more useful. I put a small list of files and programs together it is located at http://www.cfists.com/usb.htm.



Booting ISOs from Your USB Flash Drive - by Adding Grub4Dos

A very usefull program to use with this is Grub for DOS (Grub4Dos), with this you can boot anything from your usb pen, like:

- Your Hard drive (to when you ruin your hardrive's MBR)
- Isos on pen/hardrive
...

by configuring the menu.lst an execute grub.exe, or just execute grub.exe and input there the comands instead of puting them in the menu.lst file.

Now I'm going to show you how to use the bootable usb flash drive created before, to boot an iso from it, by adding grub4dos to the flash drive.

#1 - Download Grub4Dos #####

You can get it here, you just google for "Grub 4 Dos".
The file I downloaded was grub4dos-0.4.4.zip.
Now just extract it, and it should create a folder "grub4dos-0.4.4" were all of it's files are.


#2 - Adding Grub4Dos to the Bootable USB Flash Drive #####

Just copy the file "grub.exe", in the folder "grub4dos-0.4.4", to the flash drive.
And create an empty file named "menu.lst" in the flash drive, this file is the menu that grub presents, which you can configure it to have an option, to boot you hardrive (window, linux, ...), to boot ISOs, etc.

#3 - Making Grub4Dos BOOT an ISO #####

In order to make Grub boot an ISO you have to configure this option on grub's menu file "menu.lst", like this:

timeout 10
default 0

title Hirens Boot CD(9,615)
map (hd0,0)/hirensbootcd95.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot

title Windows 7
map (hd0,0)/Windows7.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot


title CommandLine
commandline

title Reboot
reboot

title Halt
halt

In this example have configured the "menu.lst", to have two isos to boot, one is the hiresns boot cd iso (hirensbootcd95.iso), and the other is the recently released Windows 7 (Windows7.iso), as you can see you can easly add more ISOs, whith a little copy paste and changing the ISOs name.

#4 - Adding the ISOs to the Flash Drive #####

As you can see in "menu.lst" on "map (hd0,0)/xxx.iso", the ISOs aren't in any folder, then just send the ISOs to the flash drive.

The flash drives files list should look like this:

menu.lst
grub.exe
hirensbootcd95.iso
Windows7.iso

And that's it you ISO booting flash drive is ready to be tested.

In order to do that your bios, must suport booting from a usb flash drive, and must have the correct boot sequence. In the boot sequence just put the "Removable Devices" to boot before you hardrive, like this it will try first to boot from your flash drive, otherwise It would boot your hard drive and would never boot the flash drive.


#5 - Testing It #####

Reboot/Start your PC with the flash drive conected, it will boot it up and stop at a DOS comand line. Here to execute Grub4Dos, just type:

> grub

this will execute grub and present it's menu, that should have the following options:


Hirens Boot CD(9,615)
Windows 7
CommandLine
Reboot
Halt


the first two as you can guess are the ISOs, just select the one you want and it sould boot up, and that's it.


Note: the ISOs in order to boot should, be made from bootable CDs or DVDs.

Booting ISOs is still an experimental feature in Grub4Dos, and sometimes It migth not work deppending on how the ISO was created.


An alternative method, to boot an ISO from a USB Flash Disk (PEN), can be found in this Blog here