Hiya, I need to know how to setup up a usb flash drive so that I can either have the os load from it, or to be able to reconfigure it to my needs. Am I going to be able to do more than just store documents and stuff on it? I don't know much about flash drives but I would like to know as much as possible before I go out and buy one, which will be very soon. Is it possible to treat it like a regular hard drive. Lets say I get a 10 gig flash drive, and partition it so that I use the firts partition to either run the os or a bootable iso image (running killdisk/Acronis or anything else I choose to create with a menu or just the one program), while using the second partition for storing my documents. Currently I use Acronis on a DVD but it takes WAY tooo long(1 1/2 hours). It would be nice to have a os load in os as a fresh install in under 5 minutes. Any experienced advice on how to use a usb flash drive to my advantage? NOT much interested in a solid state drive as I don’t know where to get one and flash drives seem to be everywhere… Thanks

The main thing you need to be sure of is if your motherboard/BIOS supports loading from USB. Then you need to make sure your USB drive is able to be booted from. Then you need to make sure your USB is large enough for the said OS. Try installing it normally selecting the USB as the default drive for installation, booting from it, and see how it goes. crappy OEM comptuers...

how do I load a Acronis ISO image to the USB drive so that I do not have to use the DVD/USB combo to load a os image?