As explained in our review, a problem with the way in which some MSI Wind U100 retail units respond to a fully depleted battery means that they need a BIOS update straight from the box. The problem is that BIOS updates need to be run from floppy disk and the MSI Wind, just like the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC, doesn’t have a floppy drive.

An external USB floppy drive is one option, but surely it’s easier to make a bootable USB flash drive and boot the netbook from that, right? Wrong. While netbooks (and most laptops) can be booted from a USB flash drive, the catch is that you still need a bootable DOS floppy to create one...

Fortunately, there is a craft way around this and after the cut we’ll show you how to create your own bootable USB flash drive for BIOS upgrade purposes without using a floppy drive.

You’ll need a number of files before you start:

• WinImage: Available as a fully-functioning 30-day demo
• A DOS 6.0 boot disk image
• The HP Drive Key Boot Utility Version 7.41

Download these three files and put them in a folder called Boot Disk on the Desktop. You’ll also need a USB flash drive – anything capable of holding a couple of megabytes or more is fine.

Step 1
Install WinImage and start the program. Go to File > Open and browse to the Boot Disk folder on your Desktop. Select All files (*.*) from the Files of type drop-down list, then select the boot600.exe file (the downloaded DOS 6.0 boot disk image) and click Open.

Step 2
The contents of the DOS 6.0 disk image should appear in WinImage. 

Go to File > Save As and select Image file (*.ima) from the Save as type drop-down list. Enter the file name FLASH and save the file into your Boot Disk folder. Close WinImage when you’re done. 

Step 3
Plug in the USB flash drive you want to use and make a note of its drive letter. The drive will be erased as part of this process.

Step 4
Double-click the downloaded cp006049.exe file to install the HP Drive Key Boot Utility (or you can just decompress it and run the hpdkbu.exe program).

Step 5
Start the HP Drive Key Boot Utility and click Next on the first screen. Select the drive letter of your USB flash drive, and then click Next again.

Step 6
Leave the default Create New or Replace Existing Configuration option selected and click Next.

Step 7
Select the Floppy Disk option and click Next.