Rufus would do it.

Never worked for me. Tried 1 or 2 other utilities which I think were more or less designed for Linux of that general period.

Perhaps I didn't set the parameters correctly. Have you actually created a USB drive that booted one.of the above?

Not with older Windows, no. I only tried it with Windows 7 and 11. It should work, but it's too long since I used it, so I can't tell you how. Might try it over the weekend with XP, I have some small pen drives somewhere that I can experiment with.

On the Rufus web site, XP is specifically mentioned as working with Rufus on a usb stick. 2K and NT aren't mentioned, but the list is non exhaustive.

I did it long ago you can definitely install xp from a bootable usb stick.

I used rufus and some guide I found online being as it was like 15 years ago I don’t recall which guide it was.

In actuality I'm more interested in NT/2000. It shouldn't matter, I guess, as with all 3 essentially the issue of uefi and different partition schemes doesn't come into play.

Now that I recall I was able to make a bootable cd with Norton years ago. It may just have been dos though. But that's most of the battle, I guess, because you can always just drop the nt or 2k cd contents onto the drive, no?

You should be able to just use whatever guide you find for xp on 2k and nt at least for the text part of setup, on reboot you may have trouble when it looks for a cd