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Problem formatting bootable thumb drive Image does not contain boot info?

#1 User is offline   Mechanized Death 

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Posted 20 November 2009 - 12:01 PM

Hello BC,

I was recently given a thumb drive with some very important software on it. It is bootable, and it appears to be booting into Windows (it says "Windows is loading setup files" or whatever the message is) but the interface that it actually gives me looks more like a Linux-based desktop.

Anyway, I made an image of the drive using a freeware utility called USB Image Tool 1.51. It saved it in IMG format. I wanted to put the image onto another flash drive (the exact same model and disk size) as a backup, so I wrote the image to the new, empty flash drive. It put the files on there, but apparently not the boot information. It bypasses the drive altogether when I boot it up (and I have the BIOS set to look for USB devices during bootup). I was always under the impression that an image contained EVERYTHING on a drive -- boot sector and all. Is this not the case?

Anyway, someone told me to pull the MBR from a floppy disk and put that on the flash drive. I did that, and it just hangs with a blinking cursor, so I zeroed it out again.

Any suggestions on how I get the drive to boot up like the other one does?

If it helps, the drive contains a folder called BOOT and it includes these files:
FONTS/WGL4_BOOT.TTF
BCD
BOOT.SDI
BOOTFIX.BIN
ETFSBOOT.COM

Any input at all is appreciated.

Thanks!!

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