boot from external USB HD 1

[CoreyWilson]

I have 160GB external USB hard drive I would like to configure to boot from. What I want to do is boot systems with this drive in dos mode and run some imaging utilities I will have stored on the drive. My problem is i cannot format the disk with a partition less then 8mb in size, this is to large to format the partition as an ms-dos startup disk. I dont know if booting a computer to dos with the drive attached and running fdisk will see the usb drive or not, i dont know if i could format /sys it or not.

Any ideas on how to approach this? I dont care how small i need to make the boot partition, as I will format the remaining space to store image files created off of PC's.

Thanks

 

[kestrel1]

The thing is not all computers can boot from USB devices. If you know that the machines that you intend to use it on can boot from USB, you may be alright.
What are you actually trying to do?
When you say imaging software do you mean something like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. If so take a look at the 911 rescue CD. You need to build the utilities for use, but once you have this done, it works a treat. I have used Acronis True Image from the CD that I created & got the image to copy straight to a USB hard drive.
911 CD can be found here:

http://www.911cd.net/

 

[CoreyWilson]

Thanks. I will look into that. I think acronis also has a bootcd/utility cd creator?

ANyways what I want to do is simply be able to boot from the cd (the machines DO support booting from usb) and image the server builds to the usb drive using either the ghost 6 or Power Quest Deploy Centre. The problem we are having is that all of our new dell clients and servers are coming with the gigabit netxtreme2 for which we cant find an ndis driver and the last generation b57x drivers dont work either. If I could get them booting from the network it would be great but I have already spent to many hours trying to make a new boot driver.

 

[kestrel1]

I am not sure if Ghost 6 supports USB devices. I use Acronis True Image 9, which does support USB. You are correct that Acronis allows you to create a bootable CD. I use the 911 cd as I can have many utilities availabe to me. I recently had to re-size a partition on a clients Windows 2000 Advanced Server machine, that had been partitioned incorrectly, in my opinion, when it was first installed.
I used Acronis True Image to make an image first, onto an external USB HD, then used Powerquest Volume Manager to resize the partition. I had both of these on the CD, this saved carrying too many disk's around with me.