making a boot flash drive

**buckley310** · April 30th, 2010

i am trying to make a windows XP boot flash drive for one of my copmputers. i delete all the partitions on my flash drive and run "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/sdb" and ubuntu can read it and its got all the contents of the CD but windows machines say i need to format it and no computer can boot off of it. did i do something wrong?

**quadproc** · April 30th, 2010

Originally Posted by buckley310

i am trying to make a windows XP boot flash drive for one of my copmputers. i delete all the partitions on my flash drive and run "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/sdb" and ubuntu can read it and its got all the contents of the CD but windows machines say i need to format it and no computer can boot off of it. did i do something wrong?

What kind of file system is on the flash drive? ext3, reiserfs, ntfs, FAT16, FAT32, etc.
I don't know what XP will require in terms of a boot so you may need to install that separately, and you may also need to set one or flags in the boot sector.

quadproc

**buckley310** · April 30th, 2010

that flash drive is unallocated. since ubuntu can read it i sort of figured it also coppied whatever format it needs

**quadproc** · April 30th, 2010

Originally Posted by buckley310

that flash drive is unallocated. since ubuntu can read it i sort of figured it also coppied whatever format it needs

You should be able to learn something about the flash drive by using the Ubuntu tools such as gparted. Try running gparted with the flash drive plugged in and select it in the device portion of gparted's window (upper right). If there are any recognizable filesystems on the drive they should show up as entries in addition to the unallocated.

quadproc