- A USB drive (either flash memory or external hard drive - either will work) large enough to hold your OS installers and/or tools. In this example, I am going to use a 4GB flash drive.
- The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool - available from here and various other sources on the Internet.
- Time - at least 15 minutes for this step
There are certain things you must do to prepare your USB drive for booting. The first is to format it correctly, and the method to do this varies depending on the type of drive you are using. If you are using a flash memory drive the easiest way to do format it is to use the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. If you are using an external hard disk drive, you can format it using Disk Management in the Computer Management MMC.
Obviously, formatting your drive will destroy any data currently stored on it, so if you want to keep that data make sure you transfer it somewhere before you proceed. I do not want to be blamed for any loss of important data, no matter how obvious this should be!
Step 1.1a - Format your USB flash drive
Connect your USB drive and then launch the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. You should see a list of all of the removable drives on your computer. Unless you have more than one USB drive connected, or a card reader, you should see that your USB drive is the only device in the Device list and is already selected. If not, select the correct drive now. Under File system select NTFS. Change the Volume label to Multiboot or something similar, to make identification easier later. Finally, tick the Quick Format option. The panel should look something like this:
Click Start to accept these settings, and when prompted click Yes to confirm that you want to proceed with the format. After a few moments, the format should be completed and you will be shown various information regarding the volume serial number, how many bytes are available etc.. Click OK and then close the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.
Step 1.1b - Format your USB hard disk drive
Connect your USB hard disk drive and launch the Disk Management MMC either by opening Computer Management from the control panel, or running "diskmgmt.msc" from the run dialogue. You will see a list of all of the drives in your computer, including all of the fixed ones. Locate your USB hard drive and delete the existing partition(s) on it by right clicking them and selecting Delete Volume. Although you can use the entire drive as a single large partition, it makes sorting your data difficult as your personal files will be combined with the files required for the multiboot - it can get messy very quickly, so it's best to use at least to partitions. Once you have deleted any existing partitions, right click the empty space and select New Volume (note - if you are using Windows XP then you will probably see New Partition instead of New Volume. Don't ask me why they are different!). Select Primary partition as the partition type, then click Next. Enter a space in MB that is large enough for your planned usage. I typically use 32GB for my multiboot partition and the rest for my data, so I enter 32768 as the partition size, although you can make it smaller or larger if you like, then click Next. Assign any available drive letter, then click Next. You will now need to choose how to format the partition, so select NTFS as the File system, leave the Allocation unit size as default, and enter a Volume label of your choosing - I used Multiboot. Select Perform a quick format and then click Next, and then click Finish. Windows will now create your partition and format it for you. Once this has finished, you should have something that looks like this;
Step 1.2 - Make the partition active
Now that your drive has been correctly formatted, you will need to make the new partition active. This is done via a Microsoft command line tool called DiskPart. Open the command prompt either from the Start -> All Programs -> Accessories menu, or by typing CMD into the run dialogue. Start DiskPart by typing diskpart and pressing return. You will now need to identify the disk number assigned to your USB drive, so type list disk to view a list of all of the drives in your computer. In this example, the USB drive is disk 1. Select the disk by entering select disk # where # is the disk number. Select partition 1 by entering select partition 1, and mark it active by with active. DiskPart will confirm that this has been successful, as demonstrated below;
The partition is now marked as active. You can now exit DiskPart or close the command prompt.
Your USB drive is now properly prepared for being made bootable. In the next step, I will explain how to use some third party tools to streamline the process.
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