How do you make a USB storage device bootable

[Jüš† ä gü¥]

I have a 64MB NexDisk (http://www.nexdisk.com) that I would like to be able to make bootable.

The website contained no information that I could find concerning this, and I even tried right-clicking and choosing "Format..." in Windows Explorer, but the option to make it MS-DOS bootable was greyed-out.

However, nexdisk insists that their product is bootable.

(They also insist that a Linux driver for it exists, although I cannot find it anywhere on their entire website and it did not come with the CD that came with it and I cannot find it on, for example, sourceforge.net)

Right now I'm just concerned with getting it bootable.

Does anyone know how to do this and does anyone know how to specify which exact file stored on it it is supposed to boot from?

My guess is to make a bootable floppy, acquire some sort of imaging software and make a .bin file which is the exact image of that floppy (I don't know where such software is, so any leads would be helpful---I know they exist, but I don't know of any that are free), and then somehow (and this is where I don't know how), directly write raw bytes from the .bin file into the device.

I don't even know that that would work, so any brighter ideas are encouraged.

Your BIOS needs to support it to be able to boot from it.

You need just three files to make it 9X bootdisk-like . . .

COMMAND.COM
MSDOS.SYS
IO.SYS

That will get you an A: more than likely. Just format it in Windows, copy those three files over from a 9X machine/floppy. If you don't have them, d/l a bootdisk image from Bootdisk.com, create the floppy, and then copy those files over to the NexDisk.

BUT, like I said before, your BIOS needs to support booting from it in order for it to work.

[Peter M]

The files don't make the bootability. A boot sector that is flagged as such, and contains the bootloader program, does.