Make USB Stick Bootable

[Lop]

Anyone know how to make a normal USB Stick bootable?

[TcM]

Does your BIOS allow this option? To make a USB bootable all you need is a bootable application, for example any bootable CD ISO can be copied to a USB drive and the USB drive will be automatically bootable.. as far as I know.

[neo1erk]

well to make anything bootable, you need offset 512 set to something. so if you copy and paste, byte 512 won't get set right i would think. However if u got some program that can write to ur usb drive directly and make it bootable, it should work.

[GMailGuy]

I think that if you have a bootable CD and copy/paste the content of the cd into the USB stick would make it bootable, wouldn't it?

neo1erk, what is the idea with the 512 offset? can you please explain it in detail

Thanks

[v0id]

I think neo1erk has heard something about bootloader, though the information he gives is kinda wrong. A bootloader's size must be 512 bytes - it's not its offset.

[TcM]

Why is that? 512 bytes to me seems quite small :s

What info should a bootloader contain (as it is that small?)

[v0id]

512 bytes is quite a lot for its purpose. A bootloader needs to have a size of 512 bytes, and end with the signature 0xAA55, to fit into the boot sectore on the disk drive.
A bootloader is the little "program" which loads an operating system. All operating systems have a bootloader, or they wouldn't be able to be booted.

[TcM]

Yeah I know that. The only thing I can't understand is.. 512 bytes seems quite small to boot an OS to me :s