I've been messing around for awhile trying to make my 1gb USB flash drive bootable. I found some instructions here and there, and I couldn;t get any of them to work very well. Too much jacking around making a disk image and then copying it and yadda yadda yadda.

I was Googling today for it because I need to go take a look at Renee's laptop tonight. The poor girl is still without power, running a fan and a few other necesseties off a generator (it's been like 12 weeks now since the storm!) and went and got a GPRS/EDGE wireless card for her laptop. Those things are $229CI and then $50 bucks a month for 40mb of traffic, and then you get charged per kb after that! Add to it the fact that GPRS top speed is 115kbps and you get a slow, expensive connection to the net.

To make matters worse, she jumped off a dock onto her boat and nearly broke her ankle. While she didnt actually BREAK it, she did enough damage that she's in a cast. Someone told me that it was exactly one year to the day that the same boat “bit” her and broke her hand. Sounds like two good reasons to sell the boat, to me.

Before I went over there, I sat down to finally put together my “portable toolkit” on my USB flash drive. Things I might need to fix a computer, especially one that can't get online. Spybot S&D and the latest signatures, F-PROT antivirus for DOS and it's latest signature files, Belarc Advisor, KILLDISK, GetDataBack, those sorts of things.

As I was searching around today, I came upon a message board post for a utility for making a bootable USB flash drive. From Hewlett Packard no less. I've attached it to the bottom of the post if you want to use it. One thing to keep in mind is that it's a FORMAT tool, so whatever is on your flash drive WILL BE ERASED when  you format it! I copied everything off of it first, just in case. :)