Making a USB flash drive bootable

Today I needed to boot an ETX module to a DOS prompt.  The system had no floppy or CD ROM drive, but it did have a USB port.  I've always wondered how to make a USB disk bootable.  My google search on how to do it revealed many hits, but most of them described a complicated process.  I finally did find a simpler process that uses a utility from HP.  The process is described in an article from APC magazine.  The HP utility is called HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.  This tool is available as a download link in the APC article, but I can't find it on the HP web site.  The other thing you need are some DOS system files.  You can get a copy of Windows 98 DOS system files from the APC article page or you can use any other DOS version you want.  The one other step is to ensure that your BIOS is set to boot from the USB drive.  Some versions of BIOS may not support this, in which case you can't boot from the USB drive.


Update 2/9/2007

Yesterday I needed to reference this information and all remnants of the link on APC's web site are gone.  I can't even find the link to a cached version of it using a Google search.  Anyhow, you can still get to the HP utility by doing a Google search for "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool".  Also someone I work with found a new link to a site that has boot files for various versions of Windows and DOS and that is http://oldfiles.org.uk/powerload/bootdisk.htm.