FlashBoot is a tool to make USB disks bootable.
Its primary focus is USB Flash disks, but other types of USB devices
are supported as well. Making disk bootable involves formatting and
copying operating system files to it. Different operating systems are
supported: Windows 7/Vista, Windows XP, SysLinux-based disks, GRUB4DOS
disks, Linux kernel etc. You may create blank bootable USB flash with
minimal set of system files and then manually tune it for your needs,
or convert a full-featured bootable CD-ROM or floppy disk to bootable
USB Flash keeping all functionality. FlashBoot can either format
physical disk or write an image file. So you may create customized USB
disk manually or with another tool and use FlashBoot to create image
out of it and redistribute it in local network or online.
Why do you might want to use bootable USB flash disks?
Unlike
the most bootable medias, bootable USB Flash keys are very handy:
compared to floppies, they have much bigger size, speed and
reliability, compared to CD/DVD discs, they are random write access
devices, so you can backup your data to the same media where you booted
from, without need to reformat (reburn) the entire media. Again, the
cost per gigabyte for them continues to cut down, unlike CD/DVD discs.
Bootable
USB flash disks are especially useful with netbooks like ASUS Eee PC
which does not have builtin CD/DVD drive or an opportunity to install
one. On the other hand, buying external CD/DVD drive for netbook is not
a truly wise choice because it will be shifted out of use just after
Windows is installed, thanks to widespread use of DVD image files and
modern hard disk capacities.
Bootable
USB flash disks are useful as boot devices on the "big" desktop PCs
too, unlike CD/DVD discs they do not have sensible surface you could
scratch, thus more reliable (especially when holding your backup data).
If your sysadmin at work restricts PC to not to have CD/DVD drives,
you still can boot from USB flash disk. Or if your home PC has CD/DVD
drive failed, you can do it too.
There
are some mobility considerations as well. If your laptop has a
bootable CD/DVD drive, you can't work with it for a long time: boot
device is accessed quite often, and battery power is obviously not
enough to supply laser for a long time.
With
bootable USB Flash disk, you don't have to obey a CD/DVD size limit of
700 or 4700 MB. You can buy a big or a small USB disk depending on
your needs. Just after boot, on every PC, you may save your files to the
same boot device, or restore them back. There's no need to reformat
(reburn) the boot disk, you just copy files and folders, and there's no
need for extra hardware for such operations. Of course you may do some
things you can't do under your OS: copy/modify system files (they are
busy when OS is running), reinstall OS, repartition your main hard disk
etc.
What's new:
- Fixed a bug in UTF-16 conversion code (special case for surrogate characters).
- FlashBoot NT password editor: Fixed shared library loading error (which occured when mounting NTFS partitions). FlashBoot now runs on Windows 8 (Consumer Preview). A bug in UDF Unicode filename conversion code was fixed. Windows 7 and Windows Vista DVD discs and ISO files should work as expected now (some of them were not recognized by FlashBoot 2.1d-2.1n).
- Size of FlashBoot core DLL file was reduced by 28%.
- This update should fix the assertion failure 2051/JT9RU in version 2.1k. Previous versions could have this error too, but under different ID.
- Version number "2.1l" skipped because of possible confusion with "2.11".
- FlashBoot installer for Windows XP now quickformats target disk. Changes in EBCD (v1.1k -> v1.2) were backported to FlashBoot Password Editor.
http://rapidgator.net/file/23445191/X-21sFB.rar
http://cyberlocker.ch/wxxcav8bmoad
