See my previous post how sandisk told me the same thing, yet I figured it out. I wrote them back explaining to them how to make it bootable for future reference, it works fine.
Many people suggest to stick with my CD, which I will, the reason I want to use my usb keychain (which I got for Christmas) drive is because I have it always on me, it's so tiny, doesn't push my wallet to its physical limits, and most of the systems I have or work on support USB booting.
Here. is a screenshot of the current CD (since this ask slashdot didn't get posted on the front page unfortunately, I can post the screenshot now).
I did notice some replies have some really good instructions, I will be trying these for sure, currently the trick to get my USB stick to boot was by formatting it using regular FAT, not fat32, then it showed up in dos when I booted with a dos disk, allowing me to 'sys' it (SanDisk wrote me explaining this device isn't bootable when I submitted a trouble ticket for this!).
I know it's only a 256 meg stick, but you wouldn't believe how useful this thing has been, I have hundreds of single exe apps on there that help me out on a dail basis. I definitely want some of my linux floppy images on there such as UDPcast, tom's rescue linux, memory scanners and more. My boss has a 1gig version, and is definitely interested in being able to have a copy of my cd on his usb drive (the cd is only around 400 megs, but can be trimmed down big time).
Have you checked the new plextor writer? I got one of these babies. It uses BURN-proof technology, licensed from sanyo I believe, which will allow a cdwriter to pause when the buffer is low. This is the first time I bought a IDE cd-rw (I am a scsi user) because of this. I was unable to create a single bad cd, no matter how hard I tried (i.e. I tried on the fly mp3->cdaudio encoding on a p266). I even tried ejecting it, and after I put the cd back in, Nero asked me if I wanted to resume my ISO (was burning freebsd). Not to mention, you can't beat the speed of this machine, 12x write, 10x rewrite.
I have been experimenting with AI bots for a few years now and decided to write an AI irc bot. The project name is ELMO (it is a real acronym, good luck guessing it tho;)) and it is pretty much finished since I reached the limits of mIRC. More programming would force me to write it in C. It is able to fool people for a long time, including experienced irc users (tested this with many people). It is not just an on 1:text... bot, this one learns, is able to build new sentences which haven't been preprogrammed, it is able to learn and pickup people's habits (which can cause funny situations sometimes), it drinks, it sleeps, it watches tv (you will laughing when you find out what his favorite shows are;)), it can be sad , it can be happy, it can be furious. There is so much more, I am pretty proud of the bot, and actually had offers from several companies that wanted to buy it (why I don't know). This was just a project to test the power of mIRC scripting but it entertained many people for many months. Right now I don't have him running, but if people are interested , I can start him up someday and show it.
Slashdot Mirror
See my previous post how sandisk told me the same thing, yet I figured it out. I wrote them back explaining to them how to make it bootable for future reference, it works fine.
Many people suggest to stick with my CD, which I will, the reason I want to use my usb keychain (which I got for Christmas) drive is because I have it always on me, it's so tiny, doesn't push my wallet to its physical limits, and most of the systems I have or work on support USB booting.
Here. is a screenshot of the current CD (since this ask slashdot didn't get posted on the front page unfortunately, I can post the screenshot now). I did notice some replies have some really good instructions, I will be trying these for sure, currently the trick to get my USB stick to boot was by formatting it using regular FAT, not fat32, then it showed up in dos when I booted with a dos disk, allowing me to 'sys' it (SanDisk wrote me explaining this device isn't bootable when I submitted a trouble ticket for this!).
I know it's only a 256 meg stick, but you wouldn't believe how useful this thing has been, I have hundreds of single exe apps on there that help me out on a dail basis. I definitely want some of my linux floppy images on there such as UDPcast, tom's rescue linux, memory scanners and more. My boss has a 1gig version, and is definitely interested in being able to have a copy of my cd on his usb drive (the cd is only around 400 megs, but can be trimmed down big time).
I really appreciate your responses so far, thanks
For more technical info about this BURN proof technology, check out http://www.plextor.be/eng lis h/technical/burnproof.html/P
I have been experimenting with AI bots for a few years now and decided to write an AI irc bot. The project name is ELMO (it is a real acronym, good luck guessing it tho ;)) and it is pretty much finished since I reached the limits of mIRC. More programming would force me to write it in C. It is able to fool people for a long time, including experienced irc users (tested this with many people). It is not just an on 1:text... bot, this one learns, is able to build new sentences which haven't been preprogrammed, it is able to learn and pickup people's habits (which can cause funny situations sometimes), it drinks, it sleeps, it watches tv (you will laughing when you find out what his favorite shows are ;)), it can be sad , it can be happy, it can be furious. There is so much more, I am pretty proud of the bot, and actually had offers from several companies that wanted to buy it (why I don't know). This was just a project to test the power of mIRC scripting but it entertained many people for many months. Right now I don't have him running, but if people are interested , I can start him up someday and show it.