Now that you know the how to configure your BIOS to boot up with a flash drive, the next step is learning the necessary steps to create a thumb drive with the "booting" capabilities. This is what we call a bootable USB Flash Drive (UDF). First of all, what makes a drive, floppy disk, device, or partition, bootable? The short answer is the boot sector. This is the very first sector of each storage device/HDD/disk.
Actually, there are two kinds of boot sectors: MBR (Master Boot Record) and VBR (Volume Boot Record), but for the purpose of this article it's pointless to explain each. What you need to know is that this block contains the necessary information that allows your system to boot up into specific operating systems (such as a bootable flash drive containing DOS operating systems will boot into Microsoft DOS, for example).
The BIOS right after the POST process checks for the existence of a boot block, and after successfully locating one, its code is executed. Typically the VBR/MBR launches a second-stage boot-loader, and this is what actually operates until the OS is launched.
All in all, to turn a generic flash drive into a bootable one, your first requirement is to "hook" it up with a boot sector. There are various ways to accomplish this task. The first involves creating a bootable floppy disk (it's the easiest), extracting its ready-to-run boot sector, and then hooking up your flash drive with it. This process will be detailed below.
Actually, there are two kinds of boot sectors: MBR (Master Boot Record) and VBR (Volume Boot Record), but for the purpose of this article it's pointless to explain each. What you need to know is that this block contains the necessary information that allows your system to boot up into specific operating systems (such as a bootable flash drive containing DOS operating systems will boot into Microsoft DOS, for example).
The BIOS right after the POST process checks for the existence of a boot block, and after successfully locating one, its code is executed. Typically the VBR/MBR launches a second-stage boot-loader, and this is what actually operates until the OS is launched.
All in all, to turn a generic flash drive into a bootable one, your first requirement is to "hook" it up with a boot sector. There are various ways to accomplish this task. The first involves creating a bootable floppy disk (it's the easiest), extracting its ready-to-run boot sector, and then hooking up your flash drive with it. This process will be detailed below.
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