[SOLVED] Find bootable flash drives

waddles · 03-10-2013, 01:37 PM

When purchasing flash drives is there a way to determine if the flash drive is bootable before taking it home? Is size of memory any sort of key?

alleyoopster · 03-10-2013, 01:45 PM

I cannot think of anyway except pluging it into a laptop (or other computer) that has USB boot enable in BIOS.

You can always make it a bootable device if it isn't one using tools such as http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ for example or following distro instructions for putting their distro on a usb to install.

waddles · 03-10-2013, 01:52 PM

It just dawned on me I think it doesn't matter because fdisk allows me to set a partition bootable, my recall is a bit weak tho on that and could not see how to do it when I brought fdisk up.

michaelk · 03-10-2013, 02:01 PM

Setting the boot flag is only a windows requirement. What makes it bootable is installing some type of boot code into the MBR which AFAIK isn't something provided by the manufacture.

273 · 03-10-2013, 03:01 PM

I have read of people not being able to boot from a specific USB drive but it's rare and may even be due to a faulty drive and not the model. If I found a USB drive wasn't bootable I'd probably send it back as faulty as I think it is now an important function of USB drives.

John VV · 03-10-2013, 03:14 PM

you might need to hit the f12 button to get to the bios boot menu then select the usb drive

i need to do that on my set up 3 installed OS's and some on thumb drives

TobiSGD · 03-10-2013, 04:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelk

Setting the boot flag is only a windows requirement.

You should tell that my laptop (Linux only), I needed nearly half a day until I realized that it didn't boot because of a missing boot flag. So the boot flag also can be a hardware requirement.

michaelk · 03-10-2013, 04:45 PM

[quoted]You should tell that my laptop (Linux only), I needed nearly half a day until I realized that it didn't boot because of a missing boot flag. So the boot flag also can be a hardware requirement.[/quote]

I stand corrected.

waddles · 03-11-2013, 04:38 AM

Super and thanks to all. Replaced the Flash drive with a Kingston and a PNY. Made my flash drive monitor and put a "total bytes written" capability to monitor all of them in my desktop shutdown script so I can watch as it approaches old age.