I'm posting this in hope that it will help others. Background, i work for a large firm and look after our corporate PC image. I use sysprep so we only have 1 image to suit all our PC's type. Now to the juicy stuff. I recently bought a 1GB Kingstom DataTraveller USB 2.0 Key drive, and was very excited as the prospect of building my machines from this drive. The reality has been one of pain and misery, as there seemed to be several issue with limited options. 1. Boot directly to pen, this proved to be a pain, but a lot of reading on this site eventually got me the HP software and a nicely formatted bootable USB pen. However one then discovers that it will only run at USB 1.1 speeds. :-( 2. Boot to a floppy and load some drivers and then access the USB to build the machine. Fraught with difficulty, finding the correct drivers, etc. Eventually got this working and it's great. Again this has issues, our engineers have to carry a USB pen and also a floppy disc. If the machine is a legacy free system then you have to make sure it's setup to use RAMFD.sys to that the thing works at all. Not happy with this i have produced my own third option which i think you will like. It goes like this... Boot directly to USB key drive (usb1.1) create a ram drive move dos to ramdrive load the drivers for usb 2.0 start ghost and load machine Sounds simple enough, but it wasn't. USB Pen files list. COMMAND.COM GHOST (DIR) AUTOEXEC.BAT Usbaspi.sys DI1000DD.SYS xmsdsk.exe emm386.exe himem.sys CONFIG.SYS devload.exe 1.bat CHOICE.COM The ghost directory contains ghost.exe and the image file. Config.sys switches=/f break=off dos=high,umb files=20 buffers=20 lastdrive=K device=c:\himem.sys /testmem:off /v device=c:\emm386.exe /v h=128 noems Autoexec.bat @Echo off @Cls @Prompt $p$g If exist d:\command.com goto nodoit :doit c:\xmsdsk.exe 1024 d: /y copy C:\*.* d:\*.* D: command /p d:\command.com :nodoit D: cd\ set COMSPEC=d:\command.com D: call d:\1.bat Echo Sleeping for 30 seconds TYPE NUL | CHOICE.COM /N /CY /TY,30 >NUL D: Command /f /c dir e: Echo Sleeping for 10 seconds TYPE NUL | CHOICE.COM /N /CY /TY,5 >NUL E:\ghost\GHOST.exe -clone,mode=restore,src=E:\ghost\Test.gho,dst=2 -sure -rb 1.bat @Echo off @Cls d:\devload.exe d:\usbaspi.sys /e d:\devload.exe d:\DI1000DD.sys exit I really hope this proves to be the answer to someones problems with booting from USB key/pen drives. I know the batch code might not be up to some other peoples standard but it's functional and works for me. Curently tested on a GX270 machine that already had a single NTFS partition. Cheers, Jason

If I want to just be able to connect to a USB thumb drive after booting from a floppy, what would my config.sys and autoexec.bat files need to look like? I already have the usbaspi.sys and di1000dd.sys files.

I am using devload.exe similarly as you did above. The problem, from what I can tell, is that they stay resident in memory versus being loaded in upper memory. I am using my solution with PowerQuest. Powerquest works fine with my current recovery solution without USB support. PowerQuest will not start up in DOS after everything boots up. Any suggestions?

That is great but where can I download all the files to make this solution possible?