I find it useful to have a USB boot disk when I am messing about with hardware, particularly since many systems no longer have a floppy drive. It was also the only useful thing I could do with the freebie Lotus QuickR 256Mb USB pen given away by Mary Beth Raven at ILUG 2008
There are a few articles on the web about creating these, one of the best is this O’Reilly Digital Media Blog
I personally found that for a windows boot disk the easiest method ( suggested in a response on the blog above ) was to use the Dell utility and rename the autoexec,bat file to stop it running the Dell diagnostic software
The utility is available at
ftp://ftp.dell.com/diags/CW1310A0.EXE
The much praised HP Drive Key Boot Utility can be found at
I struggled with this a bit because it defaults to a linux boot disc whereas I wanted a windows boot disc ( to run Ghost 2003 )