I have been looking into USB pendrive booting. It should be fairly easy to boot with a mbr hard drive image.

Here are some easy links
http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm
http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/doc-makebootfat.html

For more detail, this board has many, many threads
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=10806&st=0

For more references and links, try
http://msfn.modrica.com/board/index.php?act=ST&f=34&t=61384

For theory and background
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Xbox_USB_Compatibility_List
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/m..._detail.htm#HDD
http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:graffiti.n...SB/USBstick.htm

Off Topic

I need help to make a pendrive FDD bootable.
My 3480ct laptop does not have the traditional floppy drive instead it uses a USB floppy and the bios has an option to boot from USB FDD.

I would like to use a usb pendrive to boot (a Lexar Jumpdrive 32mb 05dch pid 0080h and GXT 1gb 1516h pid 8628h), in place of the floppy.

I have tried the usual suspects, the HP boot loader, makebootfat, and mkbt20.
I tried the demo version of the commercial product Flashboot.
I imaged a Dos 5.0 system diskette onto the pendrive using the demo of AI-Setup.
All failed including the specific option in makebootfat that images for FDD option and 3 different options of Flashboot.

I ran
http://enos.itcollege.ee/~mkalme/PAHN/Tut/Tut.html

Using ICY Hexplorer I was able to confirm that DOS5.0 on the pendrive bootsector is identical to the floppy.
I could boot in Dos5.0 from a floppy with the USB Panasonic drivers and confirm that my Lexar was a 1.44mb system disk and command.com shows in the directory. The GXT is not recognized by the Panasonic, nor Duse 4.4 nor 4.9 DOS USB drivers. One other troubling indicator is that My Computer in XP could not see any files on the the pendrives, not command.com, nor the two hidden files (show all hidden files option on).

I learned that Transcend has a specific option that creates a bootable 1.44 mb floppy
image on their pendrive.

Here is what I have gathered, corrections and suggestions are welcome.

USB protocol USB interface specifications

bInterfaceSubClass field specifies protocol
01 Reduced Block Command (RBC) a flash device
04 UFI a FDD floppy drive
05 SFF-8070i FDD using SFF-8070i command blocks however a FFD can be in another subclass eg RBC

bInterfaceProtocol field specifies transport protocol
00 Control/Bulk/Interrupt (CBI) with completion interrupt for FFD only
01 CBI without completion interrupt for FDD only
50h Bulk-only transport including bootability

I don't know if the pendrive controller must mimic the FDD protocol.

Any ideas?