Backtobasics daily feed: Win on Stick

[backtobasics]

Boot Windows XP from a USB flashdrive

The Catch

Most of us nowadays have little time to even stand by and wait for your computer to shutdown. Most of us leave right away as soon as we have pressed the shutdown button. Others even schedule their shutdowns and leave their terminals running a program. Still some use those programs to sort of time their terminals to shutdown. This way, they can run off and do whatever they need to do and save some time on being idle infront of the computer. I myself, don't want to stay infront of the computer that long whenever i don't do something so i find ways on how to automate my tasks. Inline with that, i have found a way to sort of make my mobile life a little bit rewarding. I found this article on how to make your windows XP bootable on your thumbdrive so you won't have to get into the trouble of migrating into a plethora of operating system that would eat up your time and instead leave you helpless and unproductive.

Inline with this, i will teach you how to boot your pc on your current windows setup right from your own USB. The thing here is you must have your thumbdrive formatted in a FAT-16 based file system. Most USB's these days are mirroring their hosts file system but in order for the boot-up to succeed, the hostdrive should be detected as a FAT-16 filesystem type since most systems do prefer booting up such file system types on a 16 bit level.

Requirements:

- Prepare your windows xp sp2 cd distribution. This is the one we'll use to create the bootdrive on your thumbdrive
- BARTPE or Barts Preinstalled Environment.
- And Lastly, you must have the necessary diskspace on your terminal (at least 1.5gb) for the deployment to succeed.

Procedures...

step 1 (Format your Flashdrive)
As i have said above, format your usb using fat 16. For the software needed, just type in FAT-16 on google and a collection of software that would format your drive into such will show up

step2 (Set up your bios and let the usb be the first one to be detected)

step3 (Run the BARTPE and alas! your win-on-stick!)

hope ya like it!

[geekspassion]

wooot! nice tutorial... thank you for posting it ..

[dancom96]

thanks for sharing that, well if u got it from somewhere else,
remember to quote it