Creating Bootable Windows 7 USB Flash Drive

Well now the final release of Windows 7 is out it's time to rebuild all my machines. As my netbook has no optical drive in it I decided to look into making a bootable USB pen drive to install the os. I found loads of good guides on how to do this so I thought I would put together the easiest options.

You need a USB Flash Drive with at least 4GB of space and a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 on DVD.

Even if you have an optical drive you may want to use an old USB pen drive as your chosen media to install your operating system as the performance from a pen drive is considerabbly quicker than an optical drive. In fact I did a side by side race on identical machines and the usb pen drive installed Windows 7 in 28 minutes while the DVD took 52 minutes.


Step 1: Format the Drive
The steps here are to use the command line to format the disk properly using the diskpart utility. Be warned this will erase everything on your drive.

1.Plug in your USB Flash Drive

2.Open a command prompt as administrator (Right click on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator”

3.Find the drive number of your USB Drive by typing the following into the Command Prompt window:

diskpart

list disk

The number of your USB drive will listed. You’ll need this for the next step. I’ll assume that the USB flash drive is disk 1.

4.Format the drive by typing the next instructions into the same window. Replace the number “1” with the number of your disk below.

select disk 1

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=NTFS

assign

exit

When that is done you’ll have a formatted USB flash drive ready to be made bootable.


Step 2: Make the Drive Bootable
Next use the bootsect utility that comes on the Windows 7 disk to make the flash drive bootable. In the same command window that you were using in Step 1:

1.Insert your Windows 7 DVD into your drive.

2.Change directory to the DVD’s boot directory where bootsect lives:

d:
cd d:\boot

3.Use bootsect to set the USB as a bootable NTFS drive prepared for a Windows 7 image. I’m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labeled disk F:\ by the computer:bootsect /nt60 f:

4.You can now close the command prompt window, we’re done here.


Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive
The easiest way is to use Windows explorer to copy all of the files on your DVD on to the formatted flash drive. After you have copied all of the files the disk you are ready to go.


Step 4: Set your BIOS to boot from USB
This is where you’re on your own since every computer is different. Most BIOS’s allow you to hit a key at boot and select a boot option.