How to make your pendrive bootable

After getting this new laptop, I just wanted to format my old dell inspiron 9400. This laptop when was past 3 years ago, is really fast and equipped with powerful graphic cards GeForce 7900. Which I think for that time can play most of the game. I guess doom 3 was released not really long that time too. But that time the shadow in 3D was not so intensive, this laptop can run most of the game without problem, even for Crysis and crysis warhead can be completed without much problem on medium settings. Hmm but end up now it can't run most of the 3D game on lowest setting especially this bad company 2. That game lacks so much when it was play on my inspiron 9400. And the DVD ROM is FUBAR. So I can't format and reinstall my OS. But with nowadays technology everything is possible. I start to look for information to boot up using Pendrive, as i know my motherboard and BIOS supported that function.

And to my suprise it is so easy to make it. If you are having windows 7 and vista. I believe the below command can be done using win XP fix disk. I remember when I was using DOS, we have to use fdisk alot.

So I assume you all have windows 7 or vista since windows 7 is real good now.
1. Insert USB drive to your pc and make sure you must backup all the data inside before proceeed to next step. After that, just remember to check which drive is your USB.
2. Go to start menu and type cmd at the search box, it will have cmd.exe at the top. Just right click on it and run as administrator. When there is a dialog box, just press YES! to continue.
3. When the Command Prompt opens, enter the following command:
DISKPART and hit enter. (I think in older version is fixdisk.
LIST DISK and hit enter.
after you have entered the LIST DISK command, it will show the disk number of your USB drive. In my laptop cause I have 1 physical hard disk, my USB drive disk no is shown as Disk 1.
4. In this step you need to enter all the below commands one by one and hit enter. As these commands are rather easy, you can easily guess what these commands do.
SELECT DISK 1 (if you have 2 physical hard disk you can have SELECT DISK 2 and so on)
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY (in older fdisk this is to create primary partition so later you can boot with it)
SELECT PARTITION 1 (select the first partition)
ACTIVE (make the partition to become active)
FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK (format the disk with NTFS)
ASSIGN (assign a disk drive)
EXIT (and exit(
after exit from DISKPART just do the following.
5. Insert your Windows CD/DVD in the optical drive and note down the drive letter of the optical drive and USB media. If you are using daemon tools or any virtual image, it still works. My daemon tools mount is DRIVE I. and my USB is DRIVE H.
6. Go back to command prompt and execute the following commands:
I: (ENTER!)
CD\BOOT (HIT ENTER)
BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H:
(Where “H” is your USB drive)
(you will see a message that your drive H: is successfully made bootable). If it is not, may be you are not running your cmd.exe using administrator mode or there is other error message that you might wanna share here.
7. Copy Windows CD/DVD contents to USB.
so now you will get a bootable windows USB drive.

I have tried this on windows server 2008 and it works. I am not sure about windows XP, perhaps you can use a windows 7 ,vista or server 2008 to bootsect it. then copy all the contents over.