How to Create a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows

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:

http://www.isoopener.com/

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.