With more and more notebooks and netbooks being produced without DVD/optical drives, I’ve had a few requests on how to created a USB drive to install Windows 7 from. Here is a brief tutorial on how to create a bootable flash drive, and how to install the Win 7 .iso onto that.
Step 1 is to format a USB/Flash drive so that it is clean and bootable (needs to be at least a 4GB). The Diskpart utility from the command prompt will do that, here are the instructions:
1. Open command prompt as administrator and run diskpart, use the following commands:
a. List disk
b. select disk 3 (select the disk that is your flash drive)
c. clean
d. create partition primary
e. select partition 1
f. active
g. format quick fs=fat32
h. assign
i. exit
Step 2 is to extract the Bytespeed .iso file (if you need to download any of the Bytespeed iso’s, please contact the Helpdesk). I found a free tool that is really easy to use, it’s called ISO Opener, here is the URL for it:
What I did was create a new folder on my desktop and extracted the files there.
Step 3 is just simply copy the extracted files to the newly formatted flash drive and you’re flash drive is good to go. Just boot to that like you would a CD/DVD to begin the installation.