If you have a computer that has a damaged CD-ROM or no CD-ROM at all, then you’ll need a DOS bootable USB Flash Drive. I recently had to make one for myself and while there were a lot of articles about it on the internet, they were either out-of-date or very confusing. Here is what you need before you get started:

1. USB Flash Drive that is capable of being bootable (nearly all USB Flash Drives made in the last 2 years have this capability).
2. Computer with a mother board that supports booting from a USB device (again, virtually all modern mother boards support this).
3. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool here
4. Windows 98  boot files here

Step 1 – Preparing Files

1. Download and install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
2. Download and extract the Windows 98 boot files to any location on your hard drive. I extracted them to C:/bootdisk

Step 2 – Formatting USB Flash Drive

1. Launch the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
   

   It will look disabled at first

2. Insert your USB Flash Drive. In this case I’m using a 512 mb Cruzer Mini, and the program comes to life.
3. Select FAT32 for the file system
4. Check Quick Format
5. Check Create a DOS startup disk
6. Cick the three dots and browse to the location that you extracted the boot files to (C:/bootdisk)
   
7. Click on Start
8. It will prompt you that you will lose all data on the Flash Drive, click on Yes.
   
9. Once it’s finished you’ll get a report that looks something like this:
   
10. Click on OK, then close the application
11. Open your USB Flash Drive and you will see that there are no files on it
12. Copy all of the files from the C:/bootdisk folder to your USB Flash Drive but DO NOT OVERWRITE ANY EXISTING FILES (there should be 2 files it will ask you if you want to overwrite)

Done! Now all you need to do is restart your computer and interrupt the startup process so that you can choose which device to boot off of (or manually change your BIOS to boot off of the USB Device before it boots off of the hard drive) and boot off of your USB Flash Drive. You should see a quick Windows 98 splash screen then a DOS prompt. You should have all the cool tools like fdisk, smartdrv, and format, plus quite a few others.