Author: Admin 14 April 2009 Views: 517 Other

by : tronghoa 14 April 2009 Views: 517 Software

FlashBoot is a tool 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 handy: 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.

And the most important thing is that you can use bootable USB Flash Disk almost everywhere, on any PC that has USB port. Are you going to repair your PC at your work without CD-ROMs, floppies or other media? No problems anymore. Or you have a laptop but without a CD-ROM drive? Even if with a CD-ROM drive, you can't work with it for a long time: boot device is accessed quite often, and battery power is obviously not enough to supply laser for a long time. Perhaps you are home user with a desktop PC. And you are ready to repair it with your favorite bootable CD-ROM, OK. But what if CD-ROM drive fails? Will you be able to boot or to get your backup data back?

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 tool 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:

* convert BartPE bootable CD-ROM to bootable USB disk
* transfer DOS kernel only (you may get the files from installed Windows 9x, from Windows 9x setup folder, or use built-in FreeDOS)
* convert floppy disk to USB Flash disk (a diskette or an image file may be used)
* 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.
* create Windows NT/2000/XP password recovery disk
* 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).
* duplicate USB flash disk. Just creates a copy of existing disk USB flash disk, different sizes of source and destination medias are OK.

Types of convertible CD-ROMs include so-called 1.44-floppy emulation bootable CD-ROMs and no-emulation CD-ROMs based on ISOLinux.

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).

14 April 2009 13:18