Appendix 3, Creating a bootable USB device

Major upgrades, that require the console’s hard drive to be erased, can be installed from a suitably formatted USB device. To create a USB FlashDrive that can be used to reinstall the operating system and Vista software on a T or I series console follow the steps below.

To use a USB flashdrive to boot the console and re-install the software, the drive needs to be 512MB or larger and it has to be converted into a Linux system disk. This procedure will erase all data on the FLASH drive and format it.

Once the FLASH drive has been converted, or if you have the original USB flashdrive supplied with your I3 you can use it for future updates. In this case please skip to step 4.

Creating a bootable USB drive

To create the drive:

  1. Some FLASH drives come with pre-installed software to help users manage the files on the drive. Uninstall this software.
  2. Right-click on the USB Flash drive and selecting the “Format” option from the popup menu. Take care that you have selected the Flash drive. If you select your computer’s hard disk by mistake, you could erase it completely. Ensure the File System option is set to FAT32 before clicking the Start button.
  3. Download and install a ISO file extractor programme such as WinRAR. Winrar is available from http://www.rarlab.com
  4. Download the latest console ISO installer.
  5. Open the console ISO image file with the ISO file extractor.
  6. Extract all of the files and directories within the ISO file to a temporary directory on your hard drive, for example to c:\temp\iso_extract. After the files have been extracted the directory should look like this:

    7. APX_extracted

  7. Close the ISO file extractor.
  8. Using a file manager, navigate to the isolinux directory of the extracted files, for example navigate to c:\temp\iso_extract\isolinux..
  9. Copy all of the files from the isolinux directory to the “root” of the extracted files eg from c:\temp\iso_extract\isolinux to c:\temp\iso_extract.
  10. Copy all of the files and directories from the temporary directory eg c:\temp\iso_extract onto the root of the FLASH drive. Keep all files in the directories they were installed in. This step takes a significant amount of time. When the copy is complete, the drive directory should look like this:

    11. APX_extract_final

  11. Note the drive letter assigned to the Flash drive by Windows, e.g. ‘E’. Open a command prompt and using this drive letter, type the following:

[Flash Drive letter]:syslinux –ma [Flash Drive letter]: –f

Example:
Switch to the usb drive letter to run the syslinux program
e:
E:syslinux –ma E: -f

The FLASH Drive is now ready for use. Don’t forget to eject the drive using the normal Windows procedure.

Troubleshooting

  • If you are using Windows 7, please make sure you run the command line actions as Administrator. To do this:
  1. open the command prompt
  2. right click on the ‘cmd’ icon
  3. select ‘Run as Administrator
  • The BIOS settings on older consoles may need to be changed to allow them to boot from the USB FLASH Drive.