niel4more wrote on Apr 2^nd, 2007 at 8:27pm:

If you can format the USB drive with a bootable OS from the machine that you are going to boot on, then you might have success.

By default, almost all such drives identify themselves as "removable" media so they get treated by Windows as super-floppies that don't have partitions and such in them. When they are booted, they tend to be mounted by the BIOS as an emulated hard disk; that means the BIOS chooses an emulated hard disk geometry, and it has to choose the same geometry that you formatted the drive with. Otherwise, DOS probably won't boot successfully.

Whether this actually ends up working or not is complicated, which is why some vendors supply their own format tools for this purpose - they know what their own BIOSes choose to do and what fake geometries they assign. For Ghost 2003, I don't know what process you'd end up having to go through, but it's painful because of this. If your computer vendor supplies something to format the stick and make it bootable, use that and copy Ghost onto it is the best advice.

In GSS2 we dealt with this by having the Boot Wizard format the USB drive not as a super-floppy, but to partition it as a hard disk with an MBR. Since BIOSes that are capable of booting USB also support extended INT13h LBA services, that MBR can do the old "drive overlay" trick; we have a custom MBR that installs a legacy-INT13 hook that forces the USB device to use a fixed fake geometry, forcing everything to be consistent regardless of what the BIOS prefers.

niel4more,

I'll give you the easy way.     sys C:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=11610...

If this doesn't work the HP tool is almost as quick.

Once the stick is bootable, just copy ghost.exe to the stick.