FlashBoot is a software to make USB flash disks bootable. It is highly configurable, has many options and was designed to be compatible with all USB disks and BIOSes.

FlashBoot is designed to be compatible with all types of bootable USB Flash disks, i.e. it is not binded to Transend, Kingston, HP, or to any other particular manufacturer of USB Flash disks.

FlashBoot is designed to be compatible with most of the BIOSes. Some of them require USB disk to be partitioned (USB-HDD mode), some of them require superfloppy format (USB-ZIP mode). You may choose disk format type between partitioned disk and superfloppy, when formatting your USB Flash disk with FlashBoot (if you choose to reformat). You may write the output to image file, transfer it to another PC and write it to physical device there (either with FlashBoot or with any other suitable tool, for example, with Linux dd command).

FlashBoot is a software to make USB disks bootable. Its primary focus is USB Flash disks, but other types of USB devices are supported too. Making disk bootable means reformatting of target media (that's optional) and transferring system files to it. Different types of systems are supported: DOS kernel (MS-DOS, PC-DOS and FreeDOS), SysLinux-based disks, Windows NT/2000/XP bootloader, Linux kernel, any other user-supplied bootloader.
You may create blank bootable USB flash with minimal set of system files and then manually tune it for your needs, or convert a full featured bootable CD-ROM or floppy disk to bootable USB Flash keeping all functionality. FlashBoot is able to write its output to a physical disk or to image file. So you may create customized flash disk manually or with another tool and use FlashBoot to create image out of it and redistribute it in local network or online

FlashBoot is a software to create bootable USB disks, USB Flash Memory keys and cards mainly. What are the benefits of such devices for you? Let's see: unlike the most bootable medias, bootable USB Flash keys are very convenient: compared to floppies, they have much bigger size, speed and reliability, compared to CD-ROMs, they are random write access devices, so you can backup your data to the same media where you booted from, without need to reformat (reburn) the entire media. Again, the cost per megabyte for them continues to cut down, which is not the case for CD-ROMs and floppies.

With bootable USB Flash Memory key, you may boot every PC with USB ports, regardless of non-present or broken devices, because there's no need for any extra devices. You don't have a media size limit of 700 or 800 MB anymore, and buy a big or a small disk depending on your needs. Just after boot, on every PC, you may save your files to the same device from which you booted, or restore them back. There's no need to reformat (reburn) the boot disk, you just copy files and folders, and there's no need for extra hardware for such operations. Of course you may do some things you can't do under your OS: copy/modify system files (they are busy when OS is running), reinstall OS, repartition your main hard disk etc.

FlashBoot is a software that makes USB disks bootable. It was specially designed to work with USB Flash devices. It is used to reformat flash disk (that's optional) and transfer system files to it. You have many options for your choice:

1. convert BartPE bootable CD-ROM to bootable USB disk
2. transfer DOS kernel only (you may get the files from installed Windows 9x, from Windows 9x setup folder, or use built-in FreeDOS)
3. convert floppy disk to USB Flash disk (a diskette or an image file may be used)
4. convert a bootable CD-ROM to USB Flash disk (again images are supported). There are some technical difficulties with supporting any type of CD-ROM here, see details below. But there should be no troubles with the most real cases. You may convert Knoppix and EBCD, for instance.
5. create Windows NT/2000/XP password recovery disk
6. create disk with NT/2000/XP bootloader. It would be useful when you have mistakenly configured it, and boot.ini file was left on unreachable disk (NTFS).
7. duplicate USB flash disk. Just creates a copy of existing disk USB flash disk, different sizes of source and destination medias are OK.

FlashBoot is designed to be compatible with all types of hardware. It is not binded to Transend, Kingston, HP or to any other particular manufacturer of USB Flash or other types of USB disks. FlashBoot is designed to be compatible with all types of media. It is not binded to any fixed media size or disk geometry, specific for some particular kind of devices.
FlashBoot is designed to be compatible with all BIOSes. Some of them rely on socalled superfloppy format (called also USB-ZIP format, originally introduced by external ZIP drives), some of them support only partitioned disks (called also USBHDD format, originally introduced by external USB HDD disks), others work OK with both ones. You can choose disk format in FlashBoot if you enable reformat option.

Requirements:
* 32 Mb of RAM
* 10 Mb of disk space
* Proper version of BIOS that supports booting from USB devices (you can verify this with trial version of FlashBoot)

Convert BartPE CD-ROM
Bart's PE (Windows PE built from Windows 2000, XP or 2003) CD-ROM can be converted to USB Flash Disk using the following schema:
1) Transfer Standard MBR to USB Flash disk
2) Format as FAT16
3) Transfer Standard windows NT bootsector for FAT16 is to USB Flash disk
4) Copy to the root of your flash drive from BartPE output directory:
a) winbom.ini
b) \i386\setupldr.bin as ntldr
c) \i386\ntdetect.com
d) all directories
5) Rename i386 to minint
FlashBoot uses this schema to do the job. Please note that not all combinations of BIOSes / motherboards support booting BartPE from USB disk.

Convert USB disk format
Some BIOSes require that USB Flash or any other bootable USB device to be formatted as a big floppy disk, i.e. a disk without partition table and Master Boot Record (MBR). Others require USB Flash disk to be formatted same as HDD, i.e. with partition table and MBR. Some others support both options.
Some old (DOS) drivers for USB Flash disks support only superfloppy format. FlashBoot support both types of format, if you choose to reformat the disk (note that reformatting may be avoided, in this case all files on the USB disk are kept intact, only
a few system files required to boot the disk are added). But if you have an existing USB disk created by any third-party tool or manually, and want to convert its format from superfloppy to partitioned disk and vice versa, you

Limitations:
* Created bootable disk is bootable only once, boot record is erased during first boot
* You can use FlashBoot to transfer system to your USB flash disk no more than 10 times
* 30 days trial

The license of this software is Free Trial Software, the price is $38, you can free download and get a free trial.