Well, I've promised a guy that I would make a bootable USB so that he could format his netbook. So I thought "Hey, DBan does just that, and I'm sure there's a USB version".
There IS a USB bootable DBan, but it refuses to work on any of my USB drives that I've tried. I either get "Can not find bootable partition" for the 4 GB USB stick he gave me to use, and on my own one I get "Error: No OS found"
So, can anyone tell me why the hell DBan's USB utility isn't working, or tell me another way I can make a bootable USB drive that will be able to format a netbook's HDD?
[quote]As I mentioned, there is a maximum size for the USB flash drive that you can use. Currently, USB flash drives exist in sizes of up to 4GB, and 8GB flash drives are expected to be available by the end of the year. As nice as it would be to have 8GB to play with, the flash drive that you use for this project can be no larger than 2GB. The reason for this is because you will have to format the flash drive using the FAT-16 file system, which has a 2GB limit. Presently, you are stuck using FAT-16 because most computers will not recognise a flash drive as being bootable if the drive is formatted with anything other than FAT-16.[/quote]
[url]http://www.cnet.com.au/boot-windows-xp-from-a-usb-flash-drive-339271777.htm[/url]
unetbootin **google it, it is a wonderful tool.**
Also if he wants to format it, why doesn't he just put a fresh OS install on it? Dban is a little extreme unless he is trying to sell it.
I tried unetbootin on two USB drives using an Ubuntu 8.04 ISO I have, the drives were 4 GB and 1 GB. The 1 GB drive worked, but when I boot from it it doesn't detect the hard drive of MY computer, so I assume that means it wont be able to format the guy's netbook. It actually give me the option to install Ubuntu onto my USB drive, which is silly because that's where its already installed to!
try using a 9.04 ISO rather than 8.04 (unless typo?) Also check the BIOS settings I haven't played with other netbooks but I know some laptops have settings which prevent access of the HDD outside of windows, or are set to power modes linux doesn't like. Make sure it is either on compatibility mode or ACPI or w/e (something close to that)
Go to my computer and right click on the icon, click manage and go to device manager, under disk drives right click the usb, go to properties and in policies tab check off optimize for performance, then format as NTFS, try again to make it bootable, should work this time, without sacrificing disk space..
If he is still using the HDD then use a low-profile format. No need for DBAN unless he is selling it.
I think his issue is getting it to boot into something he can use to reformat it in the first place.
There is also a write-protection option sometimes in the bios. Flash-write protection is for bios itself, but there's sometimes another setting for hdd's.
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