Bennylava

Here is what I want to do. I want to put all of my bootable little programs like Seagate's Seatools (a HDD checker) and Memtest on a USB flash drive. And be able to keep them all on it, while also being able to boot into any of them any time I want. Many people do this. However I have two questions about doing it.


1. If you have multiple programs on 1 flash drive, how does the computer know which one you want to run? Do you get to select which one to boot into, when it's booting up? Like it shows them all in a list or something, then you just move the arrow down, till you get to the one you want, then hit "Enter"?

2. I take it that if you want to boot from a USB flash drive, you change the first item in the boot order to "Removable", correct?

ericeod

I have a guide:

http://www.overclock.net/intel-mothe...herboards.html


Once the drive is bootable, just put whatever DOS utilities you want.

if you want to run a program, just type the .exe file at the prompt. For example, I have memtest 400 on my bootable usb. So after booting to the USB, I type: "mt400" and the program runs.

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*Disclaimer 1: Bios flashing is always a risky procedure. So please do so at your own risk. But I will add that DOS flashing is much less risky then windows flashing!

*Disclaimer 2: This tutorial can be for AMD and Intel. You will also notice that the tutorial includes video cards as well. But this is the section a Mod recomended that I post it in for now. I hope once it is complete that it gets moved to a more central location!

This is a planned project I have wanted to do for a while. I am working on a USB bootable bios flashing tutorial to help the community. It is still a work in process, but I have a big portion of it done (consider it a rough draft).

My goal with this thread is to pool OCN's resources and knowledge so we can create an exhaustive tutorial for bios flashing usinf a USB Bootable drive. What we need to get this tutorial completed is to get as much input from everyone on different motherboard manufacturers as possible. So if you have figured out how to bios flash a motherboard from a specific manufactuer, or even a specific motherboard, please list it. I only ask that it be done using a bootable USB.



Directions on how to make a bootable USB with the following 3 bios flashes:

1. Motherboard bios

2. NVIDIA bios

3. ATI Bios



Start off by making the USB bootable.

*Creating a Bootabe USB*

Motherboards
*For NVIDIA Bios*

*For ATI bios*




*References*

__________________
eVGA 680i Overclocking guide .......... ASUS P5E/Maximus Thread.......... 4.4GHz CPU-Z

Bennylava

So you have to have the .exe command memorized? (like mt400, for example)? There is no way to go through any kind of list?

ericeod

To run any command in DOS, you have to know what the command is. I know you can run autoexec.bat for DOS based programs and see what options are available, but i dont know about making your own. I'm sure you can make one.

__________________
eVGA 680i Overclocking guide .......... ASUS P5E/Maximus Thread.......... 4.4GHz CPU-Z

Bennylava

I'm afraid that I am not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that if I made such a "autoexec.bat", that I could see a list of the commands that would open the various programs?

Also, on an unrelated topic. Do you know if there is a list of cool or helpful Bootable programs somewhere? Ones like Seatools and Memtest. I think it's fun using those little bootable discs and I would like to have a lot more of the apps that you can run. What exactly do they call those? Just DOS programs?

Bennylava

Also, do ALL of the files that you want to be able to boot with (for example memtest, and seagate seatools) have to be added at the time the bootable drive is created? What if I want to add more later on? Do I have to go through the whole process all over again? Or can I just click and drag them into the USB flash drive? You know, like you could if it were a regular old NTFS flash drive.

Also, which memtest do I download? I downloaded the USB key one, and when I use your HP program to try to add the programs to the USB drive, I get the message in the pic below.

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

ericeod

The boot files you add to the USB drive to make it bootable do just that, they load DOS onto the drive so that you can boot to the c prompt. All you have to do is copy the exe files onto the USB drive whenever you want. Then just reboot the PC, boot to DOS, then type the .exe command.

For example, if you wanted to, just copy the memtest exe file (mt400.exe is the file) to the USB drive. When you boot off of it, just type mt400 and memtest will launch.

__________________
eVGA 680i Overclocking guide .......... ASUS P5E/Maximus Thread.......... 4.4GHz CPU-Z

Bennylava

Here is the pic. Also if you use the link to download the other thing (in your guide) it's missing some files so you might want to look into that.

Attached Thumbnails

 

ericeod

You have to unzip the folder with the dos files. I just checked and they are there...

__________________
eVGA 680i Overclocking guide .......... ASUS P5E/Maximus Thread.......... 4.4GHz CPU-Z

Bennylava

Ok cool. I understand that part.

So are you saying that I really do not have to format the USB flash drive to a DOS drive? By using the little program, I mean. I can just click and drag the DOS programs into the drive's root directory? Cause as you can see from the pic, I am having some trouble getting the little hp program to realize that there are actually some DOS files in the folder that I specified.


I extracted with winrar... I will try it again and post a pic of my results.