Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Creating a Bootable (memtest) Flash Drive from Windows Vista

I needed to create a bootable usb flash drive from vista to run memtest on my laptop with no cdrom drive. It took quite a while to get it working so I'm posting this in the hopes that it'll save someone else some time. I'm using 32 bit vista. Here's how I got it sorta working:
  • Get the hp flash drive formatting utility from http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&mode=3&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-UNITY-I23839.
  • Run the file and tell it just to extract.
  • Open up the new folder and run the installer in XP SP2 compatibility mode as an admin.
    • Right click on cpqsetup.exe and click on properties
    • Go to the compatibility tab
    • Check off "Run this program in compat..." and select Windows XP (Service Pack 2)
    • Check off "Run this program as an administrator"
    • Click Ok
    • Run (probably double click) cpqsetup.exe
  • Once it's installed, run the utility in Win 98 / ME compatibility mode as an admin.
    • Click start
    • All programs
    • HP System Tools
    • Right click on "HP Drive Key...", Properties
    • Same as above but for the compatibility mode select Windows 98 / Windows ME
    • Click Ok
    • Go back into the start menu and run the tool
  • On my machine it was realllly slow. It took about 20 minutes to format a 1 GB flash drive as a hard drive (which turned out not to be what I wanted anyway). And the utility seemed to stop responding throughout. But it did eventually finish.