Well, I tried many things to get my windows xp installation usb bootable. I don't really remember all of the tools, methods and formats I've tried.
I do know that the first thing to become boot-able was a 2GB FAT16 partition, 'filled' using novicorp wintoflash.
My fist attempts where possibly on a usb drive of a size around 7.3 GiB, so this might have been, 'truncated' was it?, by default. However I do remember trying a 3.7 GiB usb afterwards (I think). It is all kind of hazy, I'm afraid.
By the way, most of the programs did either the same thing wintoflash does, or takes the 'YUMI - Multiboot USB Creator' approach. However the later wont work because the ISO in question is larger then my RAM memory (a whooping 512 MB).
All in all, to find the real culprit I would need to do most of my own 'experiments' again. But I tried a lot and don't really know where to start. Suggestions? Perhaps you know 'experiments' that are way more useful then the once I did.
By the way, out of curiosity, how do you know there are 512 bytes-per-sector? Is this always the case? What is'the INT 0x13 drive number' and why is it usefull to know it is 0x80? What do all the question marks after the P,0,M and E imply?
I was commenting on the sentence I had just used before, not criticizing your English. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I had a feeling you were not criticizing. I just did not understand what you meant by it. I do now however lol