Boot Windows XP from a USB flash drive
You cant boot Windows XP from a floppy disk the way you used to be able to with DOS. One handy way to easily boot XP is by using a USB flash drive. Heres how to make it work. Almost everyone who has worked with computers for any length of time at all has run into at least one situation in which a problem left a PC unbootable. What if you could return the machine to a bootable state just by inserting a USB flash drive though? Believe it or not, it is actually possible to install a bootable copy of Windows XP onto a flash drive and then boot a PC off of the flash drive. From there, you can use applications that you have installed on the flash drive (anti virus, anti spyware, disk repair, etc.) to fix the PCs problem. In this article, I will show you how.
As with most cool new techniques, there are a few catches. For starters, not every PC is capable of booting from a USB flash drive. For the most part, computers manufactured within the last two years are generally able to boot from a flash drive. Older systems may require a BIOS update, or might not be able to boot from a flash drive at all.
Another catch is that not every flash drive will get the job done. The primary factors that limit your use of a particular flash drive are capacity and speed. Technically, speed isnt really a limiting factor, but booting Windows will be painfully slow unless you use a flash drive that supports USB 2.0.
The flash drives capacity is actually a limiting factor though. Surprisingly though, there are size limits on both the upper and lower end. Your flash drive cant be too large or too small. There isnt really a documented minimal size for a flash drive. You just need something large enough to hold Windows XP and a few applications. As you probably know, Windows XP normally consumes over a gigabyte of disk space. Later I will show you how to use a free utility to trim the excess fat off of Windows XP and make it a whole lot smaller. Even so, I still recommend that your flash drive be at least a minimum of 256 MB in size.
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