This one might be a bit out there for the regular crowd out there but for those of us who grew up on the DOS command line (myself included) sometimes you need to get back to basics. Some faithful tools and utilities such as SpinRite only work in DOS and in order to use them you might need to make a DOS boot disk.
Given that DOS has been dead a long time and most computers these days don’t even come with a floppy drive this can become a bit of a dark art. However, you can still make a bootable USB stick which might be useful in these circumstances as well as being able to read data off other USB devices if your computer is out of action.
Anyway, to make your own boot disk you need to download the following:
Before we get started, you’ll need to install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool on your computer and the unzip the boot files to a new folder on your computer (like C:\DOS or wherever you like but just make note of the location).
Once done, we can get down to business:
- Run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool as an administrator,
- Under Windows Vista and Windows 7 right click on the application and choose “Run as administrator” and accept any prompts that come up,
- Plug in your USB stick (WARNING – anything on this USB stick will be deleted),
- You should see something like this:
HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
- Under “Device” make sure your USB stick is selected,
- Choose “FAT” as the file system,
- Type in a “Volume label” but keep it short as DOS doesn’t handle long names (so maybe “Bootdisk” is a good choice),
- Tick “Quick Format” and “Create a DOS startup disk” while making sure the dot goes next to “using DOS system files located at:”,
- Click on the ellipsis at the end of the text box and browse to where your DOS files were extracted earlier on,
- Once done, click on “Start”.
The process should the get started and should take less than ten seconds at the most after which you should have a bootable DOS USB stick. The only problem is that there won’t be anything on there to actually do anything once you boot off it.
So stay tuned and we’ll look at what we can put on there to make it more useful!
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[…] Operating Systems, Optical, Storage, Technology by Boydo Yesterday, I walked through how to make your own DOS USB boot disk with the final result being a bootable USB stick that won’t do much more than let you browse […]