In the previous post, it described a way to create a bootable USB drive for windows installation. This was accomplished with the help of 3rd party software, i.e., Rufus. In fact the software Rufus could be replaced with another equivalent software, Windows 7-USB-DVD-tool. In theory this software should be safer as it was produced by Microsoft itself.
Here I am going to describe a method to create a bootable USB without either Rufus or Windows 7-USB-DVD-tool. The essential tool for the job would be command prompt.
For ease of description, Windows 7 would be used as example to illustrate the flow. Before the start of the process, the following items would need to be ready.
USB drive
Windows 7 ISO image
The steps could be divided to 3 phases
A. Creation of partition on USB by inserting USB drive to USB, open command prompt and enter the followings
- diskpart
- list disk
- find the drive you want and then type: select drive # (so if it’s disk 1, you type disk 1)
- clean
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- active
- assign
- exit
- format f: /fs:ntfs
B. Copy the Windows 7 ISO file to USB; mount the ISO file, then at the Command Prompt type: xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f/r/h/x f: (where f: is your drive letter for the USB drive and d: is where the ISO mounted)
C. To make USB drive bootable. Here is fun. Instead of using 3rd party software, the USB drive could be made bootable by using command prompt.
Inside the ISO file, there is this “boot” folder. Copy this folder to the hard drive. On command prompt, find this folder and enter the following,
bootsect /nt60 f:
By now the USB drive should be ready to boot to install Windows 7.
