Booting from a flash drive
 

My friend has a netbook (Dell Mini 10) that is blue screening due to the recent Windows Updates. There is no CD or DVD drive available to use the Windows CD to fix it, as recommended by MS. I don't know if you can plug in a drive in the USB and fix it. I'm assuming it would have needed to have been installed prior to the problem for it to work. Am I right about that?

If I amv correct then I'm wondering about putting the Windows CD on my flash drive and booting with that to fix the problem. I Googled, but most sites I get are from years ago and have dead links. Does anyone here know how to do it?

It is really easy to make a bootable Windows USB drive. Try this tool: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/08...a-7-with-wint/

It is slightly more complicated than just copying the files, as you need to make the drive bootable. When the Mini 10 turns on, pick the boot menu (F2 I think) and pick USB drive or select USB as the primary boot device in the bios. I've done this on my own Mini 10 many times, and it works perfectly.

Alternatively, Target sells a $45 USB DVD drive from Targus.

I always have a bootable win XP3 USB drive along with install file for must need softwares with my netbook. Like ScottC I have boot from USB as primary device selected in my Acer netbook.

Works great, in theory, but what average user has a Windows install CD these days?

If you have the key, you can either order replacement media from the manufacturer, or from a Microsoft retailer. Alternatively, you can be naughty and just download the ISO from your favorite "source".

One of the problems that you will run into is the large number of drivers that are specific to your netbook (or laptop, etc).

Make sure to download all those before installing XP fresh.

Alternatively, you could do a safe-boot or point-by-point boot and see what's wrong, and remove that.

HTSC

Does that downloadsquad linked utility take care of all the work that previously would have required BartPE and a bunch of different recipes? Last summer I built a bootable XP stick, and it was a huge PITA (and in the end it was still a subset of what I wanted).

Compared to the Linux-based USB-bootable Live images, my Windows experience was terrible. Still, I need a Windows environment to get into my corporate network, and having an emergency boot-in-joe-random-PC stick would be nice.

Thanks!! That's exactly what I needed.

Yes ( to others) We have the Dell XP sp3 install CD and it took just few minutes.