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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Creating a Bootable Vista/Windows 7 USB Flash Drive.

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. Be careful.]

1.Plug in your USB Flash Drive


2.Open a command prompt as administrator (Right click on Start and in the search bar enter CMD, right click and  “Run as administrator”














 3.enter diskpart.exe and press enter

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

5.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
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 we’ll use the bootsect utility that comes on the Vista or Windows 7 disk to make the flash drive bootable.
1.In the same command window that you were using in Step 1, Insert your Windows Vista / 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 Vista/7 image. I’m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labeled disk G:\ by the computer:
bootsect /nt60 G:

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

Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive.

Use Windows explorer to copy all of the files on your DVD onto the formatted flash drive.
After you’ve copied all of the files to the disk, you are ready to go.



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