Thinkpads Forum

Does any one know of a way to make a USB Thumb drive bootable?
I made a Ghost boot disk which works perefectly, and most recently copied the files to my USB drive. However, I can't get the system to boot from this drive.

I'm under the immpresion that there needs to be a space on the Thumb drive that will hold a boot sector. Is this true and is there a way to do it?

Thanks, steve

I believe you need to use the utility which comes with your thumb drive to make it bootable.

I had 3 thumb drives and only the Transcend has this utility.

truthfinder, I'm not sure about you, but i've successfully installed linux onto a thumbdrive (actually, it's a kingston travellite sd reader with a 1 GB SD card), and booted from it on a pc. The thumbdrive is recognized as a USB card reader. I checked the bios of this T60, and the only option is USB FDD. The card reader doesn't even light up until it gets into WinXP. I hope anyone can tell us whether this is possible or not. I'm willing to invest in a 1 or 2 GB thumbdrive as long as I can get it to boot from it. I think Bios might be the limitation.

Haven't tried it myself yet, but I saved a couple of bookmarks for the day...

http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/usbkeys

Making USB key bootable

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=24503