How to make a USB Boot Disk

calendar May 10, 2011 · 1 min read · microsoft windows  ·
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Brief instructions on how to make a USB flash drive that can boot a computer into Windows 98 DOS mode. Useful for running things like Norton Ghost.

You will need a Windows 98 Boot floppy disk and a copy of the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. There are many versions of this around on the net, the one I have used successfully is titled HPUSBFW.exe and is 436KB in size, created on 21/04/2004.

  1. Insert USB Key to be formatted into a USB port and Windows 98 Boot Disk into drive A:
  2. Run HPUSBFW.exe as an administrator
  3. In the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, V2.1.8, choose the correct USB device, the file system FAT, select “Create a DOS startup disk” and enter “A:\” in the box labelled “using DOS system files located at:”
  4. Click on the Start button.
  5. Once the process is complete reboot the PC with the USB stick inserted and the Windows 98 command line should come up. It may be necessary to tell the BIOS to boot from USB.