Creating a Bootable USB Flash Drive for Installing Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2

You might need to install Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 from an USB flash drive instead of the traditionally DVD. The process of creating a bootable USB is pretty straight forward as I will demonstrate in the following.

There are several reasons for using an USB flash drive for installation. First, it’s faster – with USB 3.0 it’s much faster than installing from a DVD. Second, it’s easier to bring around and more robust than a DVD.

All you need is an USB flash drive with at least 4 GB unallocated space and the Windows installation files.

If you got the installation files in an ISO file, you need a program to mount the ISO file. There are several free tools available on the internet. I use DAEMON Tools Light which you can download from this site: http://www.daemon-tools.cc/eng/downloads

Go through the following steps.

1. Insert the USB flash drive into a computer running Windows XP – 7.

2. Open an elevated command prompt (cmd.exe).

3. Now you need format and make the USB drive active. You can achieve this by using the Diskpart command-line utility. So in the prompt write the following command:

Diskpart and press Enter

4. Then you need to identify the USB disk among the other physical disks in your system. You do that by running the following command:

List Disk

When you run this command you will get a list of the physical disks including your USB disk. You need to identify the disk number. In my case it’s Disk 1.

5. Then you need to select the USB disk, clean the disk, create a primary partition, make the partition active and format it with NTFS. You can do all that by running the following commands:

Select Disk 1 (insert the actual disk number)

Clean

Create Partition Primary

Select Partition 1

Active

Format FS=NTFS (this might take some time!)

Assign

Exit

Minimize the command prompt

6. Insert the Windows installation DVD and identify the drive letter assigned. You also need to know the drive letter of the USB drive.

Enter the command prompt, and change the path to x:\boot> where x is the driver letter of your optical (DVD) drive. You can do that easily by running the following command

X: CD Boot

From this location you run the following command:

BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 Y: 

Where Y is the drive letter of your USB drive.  

7. Now all you need to do is copying the content of the installation DVD to the USB flash drive, and you are ready to install Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 (R2) directly from the USB device. You only need to make sure that your computer supports and is configured to boot from an USB device.