Booting off USB

Found a little note in the MSDT help files on booting off USB. I had a couple little gotchas when doing this, and I'll let you know what they are. One of the gotchas is in their instructions so I'll give you my instructions (this wipes your flash drive, just so you know).

1 Open admin cmd prompt.
2 Run "diskpart".
3 Run diskpart command "list disk".
4 Make note of the disk number your flash drive is.
5 Run diskpart command "select disk (drive number)".
6 Run diskpart command "clean".
7 Run diskpart command "create partition primary".
8 Run diskpart command "select partition 1".
9 Run diskpart command "active".
10 Run diskpart command "format fs=fat32".
11 Run diskpart command "assign"
12 Run diskpart command "exit"


Then the instructions tell you to use xcopy to copy the contents of your boot CD to the flash drive. Xcopy would not work for me. I just copied the contents of the CD over to the flash drive and it seems to work just fine.

Remember to disconnect your flash drive before your machine needs to reboot or your sequence will fail.