Windows 7 | Create a Bootable USB Drive

The time has come when we have to move on from the long lasting Windows XP and jump onto the Windows 7 ladder. So my first real post on this will be creating a bootable USB drive.
I tried this process from Windows XP but it wouldn’t read the USB drive as an active partition. So I have to recommend using any OS version above XP ie Vista, 7 or 2008.

Ok, let’s get going.
Open ‘Command Prompt’ and enter ‘DISKPART’:

C:\>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.0.6002
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: WS01

DISKPART>

This will bring you into the tool. Next you will need to find the disk number, type ‘list disk’ and press ‘Enter’:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online        75 GB    75 GB
  Disk 1    Online        75 GB  6144 KB
  Disk 2    Online       7839 MB      0 B

In this case my USB drive is ‘Disk 2′. Now you need to type ‘select disk 2′:

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

Disk 2 is now the selected disk. If you want you can run ‘list disk’ and a star should be to the left of that disk which means that we now have focus on our USB drive:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online        75 GB    75 GB
  Disk 1    Online        75 GB  6144 KB
* Disk 2    Online       7839 MB      0 B

Once the disk is selected, it needs to be cleaned:

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

Create a new Primary Partition:

DISKPART> create partition primary

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

Mark the the disk as ‘Active’:

DISKPART> active

DiskPart marked the current partition as active.

Convert to FAT32 and wait for the process to finish:

DISKPART> format fs=fat32

  100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.

Now mount the newly formatted drive:

DISKPART> assign

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

Now quit the utilty:


DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

That’s all the preparation done on the USB drive, now we need to copy over our files to boot. In this example ‘d:\’ is DVD drive (which contains the contents of my bootable cd) and ‘f:\’ is my USB drive: