In earlier articles I told about the liveCDs which can be used to reinstall the operating system with read

only media. Similarly this time we will be talking about bootable USB drives. Creating a bootable USB drive is similar to creating a liveCD. In both ways the needed files and data structures are properly copied to any media. The difference is that the process for USB is not automatic, we need to perform it manually. There are lots of methods which are used to make a bootable USB drives. Let's see two examples, for windows based OS and linux kernels. This part-1 will be showing you the process of creating USB based on windows, you can wait for the next article in which you will get the complete process of creating linux based bootable USB drive. Creating bootable USB Erie based on windows: The method will show you the process of making a bootable USB drive windows based. The USB is formatted with NTFS. I am describing the whole procedure step by step, perform them carefully on an existing windows 7 or vista machine. 1. Open terminal from administrator account. 2. Run the command diskpart 3. Command: list disk 4. Command: select disk A (a is the no. Of disk used by your UsB drive) 5. Command: clean 6. Command: create partition primary 7. Command: select partition 1 ( for the partition just created) 8. Command: active 9. Command: format fs=NTFS 10. Command: assign 11. And then command: exit to move out of the terminal. 12. Now insert the win7 DVD, change to DVD drive in your command window, then change into "boot" directory. 13. Now run the command: bootsect.exe /nt60 X: ( X: is drive letter which is assigned to the USB.
In the first part of this article, I told you about how to create bootable USB drive based on windows and now I will define the procedure of Linux based USB drive.

Let's start: Go to the terminal and perform the following steps1. Run the command: fdisk /dev/abs (assume your USB drive is assigned to device named abc) 2. Command: d ( deleting the partition) 3. Command: 1 (selecting the partition) 4. Command n and then type p to create a new partition. 5. Now enter 1 and the. Press enter. 6. Enter the size of disk that much you want to allot to the partition. (+2G for allotting 2 GB of space) 7. Press t to change the partition type. 8. Enter 1 to select he partition. 9. Enter b to select fat32 for partition type 10. Now enter a followed by 1. This will activate the partition #1. 11. Now press w. 12. Command: mkfs.vfat /dev/abc1 to format the partition. 13. Command: grub-install /dev/abc Done !!