Windows bootloader on flash drive?

Question

Iron

I'm interested in a way to put the Windows bootloader on a USB flash drive, which would load it from the raid itself.
Why is this needed? The problem is that the Asus Z8PE-D12X mother and the HP SmartArray E200 controller don't seem to be friends at all and there's no way to make it bootable. Asus tech support shrug and looks for a similar config to check compatibility. We have tried all distributions, and half of the existing BIOSes, and a couple of controller firmwares, and still nothing works.
There was an idea to stick Windows on a separate disk, make an image, deploy it back to the raid, plug in a USB flash drive and boot from it, and then the bootloader will transfer control to the raid.
How can this be checked? And is it even possible?

Answer 1

I can offer to shove Grub4Dos on a flash drive, from under it you can load anything you like. But I did not understand the description of the problem about the bootloader, so I'm not sure. But at least you will be able to see how the raid is displayed and functions during the loading phase.
In general, I think, somehow it can be done. To help utilities bootsect, bootrec, bcdedit, bcdboot.

Answer 2

You can also use the BootIce program - use it to make the flash drive bootable, and merge all the contents from the hidden 100 MB partition onto it (boot directory and two files: bootmgr and bootmgr.efi)

Answer 3

At one time I did something like this: Windows was installed on a regular disk.
The syslinux => memdisk => Windows recovery floppy image was loaded from the flash drive,
boot.ini contained the address of the Windows partition in it.

Answer 4

totalcmd has a function to write the contents of the disk to flash. The section is completely copied. You can try.