Bootable iso on a bootable USB stick

[moboking]

I have one of those all-in-one bootable CDs that contains these useful diagnostic tools like Ghost and Partion Magic. Unfortunately, from time to time I run into a slimline laptop like the Sony Viao that does not have an internal CD-ROM, but it supports bootable USB sticks. How can I make such a bootable USB stick that would boot like my all-in-one bootable CD?

 

[folken]

This looks like it might get you going in the right direction: <A HREF="http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~shaher/Bootable_USB.html" target="_new">http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~shaher/Bootable_USB.html</A>

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[moboking]

Actually I have already created a bootable USB stick. However, its functionality is quite limited because it basically is like a typical DOS boot disk. Sure I can do fdisk, format, and scandisk, but I want advanced features like password reset, file transfers, partition creation w/o loss of data, and disk imaging. For these features, I am out of luck. The problem with these highend programs is most of them run on their own proprietary DOS-equivalents. Take ERD Commander from Winternals: when I bought that program, I created a bootable CD that I have used to transfer files from an unbootable drive to a USB drive and reset passwords. But there have been cases when I had to do these things to a laptop that does not have a CD-ROM or floppy drive and I could not physically get the harddrive out because the screws were too tight. But if I could boot into ERD Commander from the USB slot, I could have taken the data out before I could fix Windows.

I have searched the Web and while there are many sites that teach how to make bootable USB sticks, none of them so far have explained how to "burn" an ISO file of a CD like that of ERD Commander onto a USB stick. I hope the next version of ERD Commander offers this feature.