Thinkpads Forum

Can anyone help me with something? I'd like to use a little program called Partition Logic on a USB flash drive. The program comes as an .iso image. I suspect I'll need to make my USB drive 'bootable' to run it, and have tried to use a couple of HP programs to do this:

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool Version 2.0.6 http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files ... 20306.html
HP Drive Key Boot Utility Version 7.41 http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files ... 23839.html

The first one (2.0.6) will create a DOS startup disk, but needs DOS system files. I don't have a floppy drive, so I can't 'build' the files by fomatting a floppy drive like so many web pages suggest. (Unless someone could point me to a set of files that would work?)

The second one (7.41) is a wizard that's not quite what I'm after, methinks . . .

IF--and right now it seems a big if--I can make my USB drive bootable, what do I do with the iso file? Do I have to 'unpack' it in any way? I know how to burn these to CD, but I'd like to have it on a little bitty USB drive if I could. Anyway, looking for a bit of help.

Paul

Ran across this program:

http://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/

Also this site has more info:

http://search.techrepublic.com.com/sear ... drive.html

Unless I am missing something, iso image files are what is used to burn CDs. They are completely useless until they have been put onto CDs, after which time you can access what is on them as you can on any disk. This is not to say that there may not be a program out there that can do this directly from an iso file, but if there is I have never heard of it.

I think that if you use your CD burning software it will be able to take that iso file and turn it into a CD. The CD you make will then be like any other CD that has a software installation package on it. It may be self booting or it might not, that depends on how the original CD was configured that was used to make the iso file. You may need to click on the executable file in order to get it to run if autoplay or self booting don't work. My guess is that the disk will not be self-booting but will probably either autoplay when put in the optical drive, or you can start it by clicking on the executable file.

Once you have the CD you will be able to do with it whatever the CD is designed to do. Perhaps it will make a program that will boot off of a USB drive, but that would depend entirely on the program itself. And you might be able to use another program such as what Ray has suggested with whatever the program on the CD has, to make a bootable USB drive.

In any event, you need to burn the CD first to see what it is designed to do, and then can try to do other things with it to the extent that they will work.

My understanding is that an .ISO file is basically a raw image file of how the data is stored on a CD. I believe that all of the .ISO files I have encountered are bootable once you get them burned onto a CD, but like Ken says, it depends upon how it was constructed. Since you need boot sectors written in a certain way to make a CD bootable, the use of .ISO files makes this easy. If it was just a normal "data" CD, then you wouldn't need to go through the steps required to make an .ISO; just .ZIP the files and send it that way.

Looking online, it appears that there are several programs (*NIX especially) that can "mount" an .ISO file and access it as if it was a CDROM.

You can open up an ISO on windows using many programs, eg, UltraISO, WinImage, 7-Zip. All of those are either free or have free trial versions. Bootable CD's are made bootable by the extremely high-tech route of having the image of a bootable 1.44Mb floppy on them. You can extract that image with any of the above tools, and then you can look inside the floppy image using UltraISO, WinImage, or any of several other free tools.

Whether any of this helps you to run the particular programme in question, is a different matter. Some software distributed as an ISO will specifically check for the CD drive, and so it will never work from a USB drive without modification (possibly something as simple as commenting out a line in the autoexec.bat in the DOS filesystem on the floppy image in the ISO image -- you may want to dig out your old DOS manuals for this...)

Lev

you can use microsoft's free virtual cd emulator for xp (xp only).
below is the link. it's nice and small and no need to install...

http://www.softwarepatch.com/security/x ... nload.html

jkahng

So if I put a 'cd emulator' on a usb stick, I could run an iso with it? Or does it have to be running in XP?

I'm not sure if this work with the USB flash but it should:
Like lev wrote, you can open it with MagicISO, or like I recently opened an ISO - I installed Slysoft VirtualDrive (the CloneDVD guys), it made a drive ie. F:, right cliked on it, chose "Mount...", chose the .iso file, OK. It then looked as if there was a CD in a drive and the game installed regularly.