One of my server motherboards supports booting from USB, but only from "USB Floppy" or "USB ZIP Drive". I followed various guides creating an active, bootable partition on the USB Pen Drive with the Windows Server 2008 DVD contents. While this boots fine on my latest notebook, it fails to boot on the good old server ("Invalid partition info", presumably because it expects a 1.44" floppy). I have spent the last three hours with trial and error.
How can I turn my USB pen drive into a bootable "floppy" that launches Windows 2008 setup from the attached USB DVD drive?
Best Answer
If your systemboard insists on the USB drive looking very much like a floppy then you're in trouble because you obviously can't fit W2K8 into 1.44MB - have you ensured you have the systemboard's latest firmware revision - lots of them can boot from a bootable USB drive of any size if they have the latest code.