Create a bootable USB drive to install Windows

Its very common for servers to be delivered without a DVD-ROM drive these days and PC’s are not far behind in this regard. Ofcourse you can use a portable DVD drive for installation purposes, but that’s hardly ideal and not very fast. Since modern computers have the option to boot from USB a better approach is to put the install media on a USB drive and install from there.

I have verified that the method below works for the following Windows versions:

  • Windows Server 8
  • Hyper-V Server 8
  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Hyper-V Server R2
  • Windows 7

All you need for this process is a big enough drive (4GB minimum for most install media) and the ISO/Disk of the OS you want to install.

Stick the USB stick in a  free USB port on your computer equipped with a Windows OS. For this example I used Windows7 as the Operating System to make this happen.

Open the command prompt (make sure you run the cmd prompt as administrator) and put in the following commands:

diskpart

list disk “list the disk in your system including the USB”

select disk “Disk number”

clean

create partition primary

active

format fs=fat32 quick

assign

exit

Mount the ISO  and copy all the content of the desired ISO/Disk to USB stick.

Now the bootable stick is ready for use.

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