After the death of floppy drive, now USB flash drives are quite popular among computer users basically to carry files but do you know that that you can also boot your system with USB Flash drives ? as with these flash drives, It will be really helpful to recover important files if our PC crashes. Earlier, we had already discussed about linux USB drive boot which can boot directly from USB flash drive. Now, we are going to tell you how to run XP SP2 from USB flash drive (this method can be used to boot vista and windows 7 and other operating systems too using flash drive).

Before continuing be sure about following points

1. Before continuing, make sure that your system has support for USB2.0 otherwise this whole process will be very slow..
2. Also the USB drive should not be larger than 2GB as it will use FAT16 file format which can’t support drives more than 2GB.
3. You need to download 2 free utility, HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and BartPE.

Now, you can boot XP SP2 from USB flash drive in few simple steps …

• Format the flash drive using that HP tool in FAT format.
• Now, you need to make your flash drive bootable copy BOOT.INI, NTLDR and NTDETECT from the root directory of your system to the USB drive. By default, these files stay as hidden; you need to unhide from folder option. Otherwise you can also use command prompt to copy those files.
• Now it’s time to use the previously download PEBuilder. Actually normal Windows Installation takes GBs or space and with PEBuilder it will make it in around one forth of that space. After opening PEBuilder, you will get a screen as follows. Here enter the path of your XP SP2 folder on your CD. After this make sure that Create ISO Image and the Burn to CD checkboxes are NOT selected. Now just click the Build button and PEBuilder will create the new Windows build.

• Now find a special batch file PEINST.CMD at the C:/pebuilder313/plugin/peinst folder. It’s a special batch file that will copy Windows on your flash drive. Now insert your formatted flash drive and run that batch file from command prompt.

• On the command prompt Type 1 and press enter; next enter the path (C:\pebuilder313\BartPE) to the build which we have created on setp3. Next, type 2 and press Enter and you will be asked to enter the target path, here put the correct drive letter of your flash drive. Now just type 5 and press Enter to complete the Windows XP SP2 installation on your flash drive.

• That’s all, now just change the booting order and set USB HDD as first boot preference.

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