Making my USB HDD bootable

[ballamine]

Having an external USB disk which I want to make bootable. First, please NOTE that, YES, my motherboard does support booting from USB devices, also my usb hdd shows up in the "boot order" table if connected at power on, and I can select it if wanted, but it wont booot. Ahh, one more thing, partition 1 (FAT32) is also made active.

 

Problem is. How can I make first partition a system partition while formatting??? Both win2k and WinXp lack this feature, Format command does no longer support the /S option (or it is hidden using another tag), and the sys cmd is not provided any longer either. Conclusion, Microsoft sucks.

 

When using winHex to read usb hdd (physical access) I see that there is a MBR recorded and the VBR for partition1 does also contain some code (however, i do not got the scills needed to decode it). I have tried to copy neccessary MSDOS 7.0 or 5.0 (both tried) files to root with no success, this most possible because the VBR is not set correctly according to these OS.

 

From winhex I can see that one of the strings used if boot fails (I cant see any when booting using the usb hdd as boot device) says that Ntldr is missing, which I thinks indicates that VBR expect a win2k/winxp OS.

 

Thus, I beleive the problem is that the partition is not formatted correctly to be able to use a msdos operative system and thus it wont boot. For now i think that the mbr is correct. If anyone can help with advices or tools to format partition with system files correctly (ie. fix VBR to ask for MSDOS), I would be very happy.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Best regards

Ballamine

[AWS]

Am I correct in assuming you want to boot msdos from the USB drive?