When the computer won't boot from the USB flash drive, it's often because the motherboard initializes all USB ports during start-up. A RAM disk often provides an effective remedy in such cases.

A RAM disk works like a virtual disk drive and copies all of the files from the flash drive during boot-up, before it's fully initialized. That RAM disk also replaces the flash drive as the boot medium. To use a RAM disk you need Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003 (free) and the program Pe2usb.cmd (Freeware). Download Service Pack 1 (it's approximately 350 MB in size) into a folder of your choosing (for example, C:\server2003sp1". Create a subdirectory in your PE Builder folder ("C:\Program Files\pebuilder313") named srsp1 and copy the file named "C:\server2003sp1\i386\setupldr.bin" into that directory.

Open a Command window using the "Start, Run..." menu sequence, typing "cmd" into the Open: dialog box, then click OK. Extract the file named "ramdisk.sy_" into the same folder as follows:

expand -r C:\server2003sp1\i386\ramdisk.sy_ \pebuilder313\srsp1

Reformat your flask drive. To do this, click through the following menu sequence "Start, All Programs, HP Company," then select the "USB Disk Storage Format Tool". Select the USB flash drive from the "Device" list, select FAT at the file system, then click "Start".

Download the "Pe2usb" tool into the PE Builder file on your hard disk ("C:\Program Files\pebuilder313". Inside Windows Explorer, navigate to that directory, then drag the file named "Pe2usb.cmd" into a Command window and drop it there. The file with a complete path specification appears on the command line. Add the drive letter for the USB flash drive to this line, then launch the command with the Enter key:

<path>\pe2usb <drive letter>:

After that, the USB flash drive is ready for booting.