Sometimes those UH-OH days happen and you need to reinstall your OS. When that happens, a bootable thumb drive can save time without optical drives (flash discs are much faster) or having to carry the original setup disc with you. Such thumb drives make all the more sense when the netbook that crashed doesn’t have a CD ROM- in this case, the only way to revive the computer is with the thumbdrive!. Here’s a quick way to making a bootable USB key under either Vista or Windows 7 in just 8 easy steps.
1. Activate the Windows Command Prompt in your Start Menu and execute as an Administrator.
2. Type “diskpart” to launch Microsoft’s disk management utility. The command line should now read “DISKPART>”.
3. Enter in “list disk” to show a list of all disk drives. Your USB should come up.
4. Enter select disk #, with the thumbdrive’s disk number in place of #.
5. Enter clean for the utility to clean the disk, which DiskPart will then execute.
6. This is the easy part. Create a bootable partition by selecting create partition primary.
7. Make this partition active.
8. Format the key by inputting format fs=fat32. For some reason NTFS format doesn’t allow a USB disc to boot..
Presto! You have a bootable flashdisk! It’s fast, it’s zippy, and if it is at least 1Gig, you can transfer the entire OS onto it for rapid setup. Sure beats carrying a stack of 1.44MB floppies around eh?
