Booting from a Flash Drive for Dummies

Bootable USB drive

A long time ago, we figured out that the minimum word count (MWC) at Demand Media Studios^1,2,3  provided "cover" for a lot of people who, to be blunt, had no idea what they were talking about. The most common symptoms of a freelancer faking it are often answering the wrong question, throwing all sorts of factoids at the page to meet the MWC, or a combination of both. Today's DotD nominee, Blair Williams (not the hunky actor from "LA Law") tried both methods in pretending to answer the question "What Files are Needed to Boot From a USB?" at ItStillWorks.com. We said "pretending to answer" because... well, because he didn't.

Oh, Williams met the all-holy MWC all, right – we clocked him at 443 words – but he never actually got around to answering the original question. In fact, he doesn't use the word "file" until the last paragraph of his alleged instructions, in which he says,

"As of 2010, the installation files for the latest Snow Leopard version is a little more than 6 GB, so you'll need a USB [sic] with a storage capacity of 8 GB. Use the Disk Utility tool to copy the Snow Leopard files from your installation DVD to your USB."

Apparently, Williams and some CE think that "USB flash drive" and "USB" are the same thing. Oops...The rest of Blair's post? it's about how to use a flash drive as a boot disk, not what files need to be on the drive; much less anything about ISO or "image."
In case you wondered, the Wikipedia entry for boot disk says that a boot drive for a computer running Windows needs to include

1. A valid boot sector in form of a volume boot record (VBR)
2. IO.SYS or IBMBIO.COM
3. MSDOS.SYS or IBMDOS.COM 
4. COMMAND.COM

Williams couldn't be bothered, however, to look up that information. No, all he thought was important (besides his assumption that a flash drive is also called a "USB") is that your drive be bootable. Other than that? zippo. Now you know why Blair and his ignorance tripped our staff's bullshit detector, and why Williams is now the proud owner of a Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ Parent company of eHow
² Renamed "Leaf Group" in 2016
³ AKA "DMS," as in "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS.'"

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