So you say want to make your flash drive DOS bootable so you can do all kinds of cool stuff like easily flashing your bios, etc.?
...And you want to have access to all of the space available on that flash drive once booted into DOS too?!

Ok... Easy! 

To get started you need just two things:

1) HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (Works with any brand flash drive!)
(This is an older version that seems to be more "compatible"... it's worked very well for me under both XP and Vista!)
HPFLASH1.EXE (1.98 mb)

2) DOS System files (These are needed by the HP utility to make the flash drive bootable):
SystemFiles.zip (151.42 kb)

 

Please keep in mind that this process will FORMAT your flash drive and any data on it will be lost! So be sure to backup your flash drive before starting this process! All the usual "I will not be held responsible” jargon applies here! So in other words… If your machine dies or you loose data, etc in  relation to any of this I won't be held responsible.

 
Now then...


1) Start by installing the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (HPFLASH1.EXE)

2) Now open the SystemFiles.zip file and extract the contents into a seperate folder

3) Launch the utility and set the options using the screenshot below as a guide.
(Be sure to select FAT for the "File system" dropdown... I've not had any good luck at all with FAT32 or any of the others.)
(Scratch that... FAT32 has been working just fine and you'll need that for flash drives larger than 2GB, etc.)
(The "DOS system files" it's refering to are the ones you extracted in step 2, above.)

4) Click Start

5) You'll get a warning letting you know that your about loose all data on the flash drive... As long as you backed up your data go ahead and click "Yes".
(If you got a warning indicating the device was in use it's most likely because you have an explorer window opened to the flash drive directory, etc. Just close out any other running apps and try again.)


That's it! At this point you should have a flash drive that you can boot off of! :)  Keep in mind that you may need to tweek the boot options in your bios, etc. to boot from the flash drive but you should be good to go otherwise.

Note: Depending on how your Windows Folder Options are configured you may or may not see any files at all on your flash drive after the HP Utility is done. Rest assured they are there...they're just hidden. To confirm their existance you could either set your folder options to show hidden and system files or just simply drop down to a command prompt and run attrib against the flash drive letter as shown in the following screenshot: