How to Create an Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant USB Flash Drive Manually on a Windows XP System With Syslinux

Before You Begin

• You should have already downloaded the Syslinux and Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant archive files. See How to Get the Syslinux and Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant Software.

• As an alternative, you can use a Windows autorun HTML application to automate this procedure described in How to Prepare an Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant USB Flash Drive With Windows Autorun.

1. Extract the contents of the downloaded syslinux-version.tar.gz archive file (where version represents the Syslinux version number) to a folder on the Windows XP system where you will be creating your USB bootable flash drive.
2. Extract the contents of the downloaded HIA-version-usb.zip archive file (where version represents the Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant version number) to a folder on the Windows XP system where you will be creating your USB bootable flash drive.
3. Insert the USB flash drive into a USB 2.0 port on the Windows system where you will be creating your USB bootable flash drive.
4. After Windows has found the new hardware, double-click on My Computer from the desktop.

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   Caution - Be sure to confirm and make a note of the device name of the USB flash drive (for example, A: or B:). The instructions listed here require you to delete an existing partition(s) on the USB flash drive. Misidentifying the device can result in the accidental erasure of content on an existing drive.

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5. Right-click on the flash disk icon in the list of hard disk drives, and then click Format.

   The format screen box appears.

6. From the File system drop-down menu, select FAT32 and enter 'OHIA' for the volume label.
   
7. Click the Start button.

   The flash disk is formatted.

8. After the formatting has finished, click the Close button.

   The Format screen box closes.

9. Click the Start button from the Windows task bar, and then click Run.

   The Run screen box appears.

10. Start the syslinux executable using the -ma option to make the drive boot capable by entering the following command:

    path\syslinux.exe -ma X:

    where path is the path to where syslinux.exe was extracted (typically under resources\autorun\windows) and X is the drive letter for your USB flash drive (for example, A: or B:)

    This creates a file ldlinux.sys on the drive and makes it boot capable.

11. Extract (unzip) the contents of the downloaded HIA-version-usb.zip archive file to the USB flash drive.
12. To remove the USB flash drive, click the Safe to Remove Hardware icon and remove the flash drive from the system.

    The USB flash drive is now ready to boot the Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant application.

Next Steps

How to Boot the USB Flash Drive and Launch Oracle Hardware Installation Assistant