And then there's all the usual traps, such as having the partition boot records needing to be patched on XP, because unlike Vista or later, it equates an USB Flash drive to a floppy, as well as Windows' somewhat mysterious handling of Physical Drives vs. There's also this whole business of allowed cluster sizes. Then you will find that FormatEx kind of destroys your partition table when you want to use LBA, so you need to fix it manually. Also, you may be surprised to hear that Windows doesn't actually provide a public API to format a drive, and instead you have to hijack an undocumented one called FormatEx, and which can be found in fmifs.dll. As I already explained, there's some reason why Windows doesn't do it natively. You'd think there wouldn't be much to formatting an USB flash drive for DOS on Windows, but you would be wrong.
Some interesting technical details (or yet another annoying technical rant) Simple utilities should only be Open Source, period. Also, the fact that the many people, who have taken a stab at creating their own DOS bootable USB formatting utility, decided to go closed source doesn't really help. Well, the truth of the matter is that, after having used the HPUSBFW utility for some time, it turns out that I really can't stand proprietary software utilities (as well as Windows' glaring shortcomings), so I decided to create my own Open Source version of an equivalent tool. Of course, Rufus is compatible with all versions of Windows starting with Windows XP and lets you use the always awesome FreeDOS alongside the rather old and not up to date Windows Millenium DOS. Please make sure you check the official Rufus page, and stop looking further when you need a DOS bootable USB stick. Plus you will find welcome additional features, such as the ability to check your USB stick for bad blocks.īest of all, and as you have come to expect from this site, it is 100% Free Software. It can also create bootable USB from ISO images. If you have been using the old HP Utility to create DOS bootable USB, you can throw that old thing away! In a small executable, and with no requirement for an installer, Rufus offers you a much better and up to date interface, with better features, and a DOS creation that doesn't rely on external files.
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