USB Boot for CF-R3

I've been using the Panasonic CF-R3 (revision E) as my primary laptop since December 2004. It has been 18 months, and, as is typical with Windows XP, the system has gotten flaky. In particular, every three days or so, Firefox will freeze for about 90 seconds while csrss.exe stays at max CPU. I have no idea why. Clearly, it was time for an XP reinstall.

The system came with a fat32 partition which included a ghost image. All I needed to do was boot to dos and restore the image to the primary NTFS partition. But, the CF-R3 has no optical drive and no floppy drive. And I didn't want to buy a USB floppy or a USB optical drive, since I had no use for those things. I got a USB Key instead: the Corsair 4GB Flash Voyager. The task now was to get the R3 to boot from the USB flash drive.

Unfortunately, Corsair's software wasn't able to make the drive key bootable. I don't know why this didn't work, but here is what I did to get it to work.

1) Use HP's drive key boot utility, available here.

This software sets up a linux partition on the USB key which can boot. HP's utility will let you save multiple floppy images onto the usb drive and let you boot from them. But, it needs to read the image off an actual floppy. And, as I mentioned, I don't want to get a floppy drive. So....

2) Use Ken Kato's virtual floppy drive, available here.

This gave the CF-R3 a floppy. This let me execute a bootdisk creator (a standard one is here; a good one is here), creating a "virtual" floppy that the HP utility could read to create boot images on the USB key.

That was it! After reinstalling, the glitches went away...