Bootable DOS/Windows USB Stick How-To

For a long while now I’ve been trying to develop a set of instructions that anybody can follow that will allow to do something seemingly simple:

Create a bootable USB stick without the need for a floppy drive whatsoever.

It took me a good long time on how to figure out how to do this in a way that will actually work. There are many tutorials on the internet showing a million different ways how to do this. Almost all of them are ridiculously difficult and/or require a bootable floppy disk (or worse yet, bootable CD-ROM) just to get a USB stick to boot to an MS-DOS prompt, FAT32 style. The FAT32 is required because most of us have USB sticks 1GB or larger.

After a whole lot of trial and error, this is what I’ve come up with. It is guaranteed to work. The only time it wouldn’t is with larger-than-4GB USB sticks.

Here’s what’s involved:

1. Installing a virtual floppy disk driver to simulate a floppy drive with assignable drive letter.
2. Formatting the virtual floppy disk with bootable files from within Windows.
3. Running a utility to format the USB stick and use the virtual floppy’s boot files to make the USB stick bootable.

Absolutely none of this requires any real floppy disks whatsoever. And it works.

Step 1. Installing the virtual floppy disk driver

There’s a dirt simple program called Virtual Floppy Drive v2.1. What this does is create a virtual drive very similar to the way virtual CD-ROM drives are mounted via ISO files.

This is nothing but a ZIP file that you extract. I extracted it to folder C:\VFD (a folder I created). Then I run the file vfdwin.

If you’re using 2000 or XP, just double-click to run it.

If using Vista or Win 7, right-click and Run as administrator, like this:

If you don’t run as administrator in Vista/7, it won’t work.

Go to the Driver tab and click Start, like this:

Click on Drive0 tab, then click the Change button. Assign it a drive letter. In my system I assigned it drive letter A. You don’t have to choose A if you don’t want to. Pick whatever drive letter you want.

Example:

It is recommended you click the Persistent / Global else you might run into weird issues.

Once done, you see this:

We go to My Computer to make sure it exists:

Double-clicking on the virtual floppy drive will result in an error to which Windows will assume there is nothing in the drive:

That’s fine because we haven’t created the image yet.

Back in VFD, click the Open/Create button from the Drive0 tab.

Choose 3.5" 1.44MB (which it should be by default), then click Create.

This will be created instantly. You should then see this:

We’re not done yet because we have to "format" the floppy. Click the Format button on this same screen.

You then see this:

We’re done here at this point as drive A (or whatever letter you assigned) is ready to be written to.

Step 2. Formatting the virtual floppy disk with bootable files from within Windows

This part is really easy.

Open up My Computer, right-click the virtual floppy drive and click Format.

Above: Tick the options to perform a Quick Format and Create an MS-DOS startup disk (which in Windows 7 will use Windows ME DOS-bootable files, oddly enough). Then click Start.

The virtual floppy will be formatted instantly.

3. Using the HP utility to format the USB stick will the floppy bootable files

If you’ve messed around with USB sticks long enough, you’ve probably used this utility at least a few times. Well, we’re using it again here.

Where it’s located: http://www.bootdisk.com/plan081009/hpflash1.zip

Run the EXE to install the utility.

In Win Vista and 7 you must do so with Administrator privileges. This also must be done to run the program in Vista/7.

Run the program and tick the options for Quick Format and Create a DOS startup disk, and also tick "using DOS system files located at:" and choose your virtual floppy disk drive.

It should all look like this:

Note: It’s important to choose Quick Format else the stick will take a really long time to format.

When ready, click Start.

When finished, which should happen really quickly, you’ll see something like this:

An ta-da, you’ve got yourself a DOS-bootable USB stick, FAT32 style. We’re all set.

Optional Step 4. Cleaning up the VFD stuff

All this VFD stuff, unless you specified otherwise, is loaded into your RAM temporarily. Don’t worry it won’t crash your computer or anything like that. But you’re probably wondering how to undo all the stuff VFD does for drive letters, clearing out the RAM usage, etc. That’s easy.

In VFD, do the following:

• On the Drive0 tab, click Change and set the drive letter to (NONE). You may have to scroll up to see it.
• Click on the Driver tab and click the Stop button. This will disable the service. You will be prompted to save the floppy image in RAM. Don’t bother and click No to stop the service.
• On that same page, click Uninstall. The virtual driver is then uninstalled.

That’s all there is to it. If you want to reinstall it again, just run it again and follow the instructions above.