Windows 7: Problem with Bootable Flash Drive

Remember the good old days (MS-DOS 6.22) that your system is running great and then one day it doesn't boot? You immediately put in a disk into your drive, boot the system up and that great looking "A" prompt would be there? How can I do that with a flash drive? I've tried at least 1/2 a dozens from googles and they want you to just make a copy of your windows 7 CD, and then when you boot it off the flash drive, that program wants to reinstall windows 7. I don't need that, I want to be able to find the flash drive. The reason now is more interesting is that since I have a DELL computer, I'm trying to get back into the recovery part of my hard drive and re-connect to that. I've tried F8, CTRL11 and both those don't seem to work at all. Well the F8 does, but can't find "how to restore your computer back to factory settings. So that's everything in a nut shell, and any help would be great.

To create a DOS bootable USB drive Rufus - Create DOS bootable USB drives

There is one with FreeDOS and one with MS DOS.

You have access to a Command Prompt in System Recovery Options on the Windows 7 installer which can have it's ISO file extracted using ImgBurn and then written to a flash stick using Universal USB Installer with Windows 7 in dropdown menu.

Dell Restoring Your Computer´s Software to the Factory Settings
Dell Recovery Partition - restoring F8 link

Thanks for all the replies on this subject. I've decided to reformat that section of my HDD (which I can't use) and reformatted my HHD. I will however, highly recommend that if anyone wants to make a bootable USB stick to use Rufus . It's a very easy program and nice. Thanks

Just a heads up, but your typical MS DOS boot disk will not be able to access an NTFS formated hard drive. It would have to be formated in FAT or FAT32 for DOS to access any files on it.

Go back into the BIOS and reset it to boot from the USB

Again, thanks for all the advise on this subject.

True.

If one needs to read and copy from NTFS, just download READNTFS.exe from NTFS Data Recovery Software. BootDisk, Freeware NTFS DOS and more... , stuff it into the bootable DOS drive and run it. As simple as that. But files have to be copied to a FAT32 drive.

However, we are now enterng into the realms of Data Recovery, and to recover files from an NTFS drive I would prefer accessing it from another OS. Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer . One can copy the recovered files to a FAT32 or NTFS drive.

Yeah, I have a copy of NTFSDOS Pro kicking around here somewhere. I think I might have used it once, on a laptop. As you say, most of the time I just slave the drive into another PC for quick and easy file recovery.