USB Flash Drive Bootable XP Image?

[Will Rickards]

How do I take a 1GB usb flash drive and get it to boot an XP install CD image?
I've got the iso for the CD image.

Situation is a friend has an acer aspire one machine that she thinks she filled the hard drive on, so windows won't boot now. I'm trying to get to a point where I can delete some files from the hard drive.

 

[Stereodude]

Look at Bart's PE

 

[Will Rickards]

Following these instructions, we'll see how it goes.

 

[Will Rickards]

Well it starts to boot, loads the ramdisk and then hangs at Please Wait.
I used 2003 SP2 instead of SP1 and an OEM XP SP3 CD.

 

[Stereodude]

Did you load drivers for the SATA controller per chance? (assuming it's in AHCI mode)

 

[Will Rickards]

No drivers were loaded

 

[Will Rickards]

Issue was using files from server 2003 SP2. I switched the the SP1 versions like in the tutorial and it worked. Deleting some files now, running a chkdsk.

 

[ddrueding]

For the record, it would have been easier to just download Ubuntu onto a thumbdrive. You could boot completely off the thumbdrive, and have complete access to the hard drive via a nifty GUI. You'd even be able to copy files off to the network or thumbdrive.

 

[Stereodude]

Does that give him write access to the HD?

 

[timwhit]

Does that give him write access to the HD?

When I've used a Fedora live image from a USB thumb drive I have write access to almost any filesystem out there.

If you don't have write access you can simply umount the drive, update fstab and remount.