How to make a bootable drive for windows 7

introduction

In this tutorial, I will show the steps required to properly create a USB bootable Windows 7 installation, easy and fast! The same installation procedure is applicable for Windows 8 installations as well.

The idea behind such a process is to streamline OS installations on PCs and laptops which either have defective CD drives or have no such drives. A very big space and time saver!

Requirements:

1. A USB pen drive with a minimum capacity of 4GB
2. An installation ISO image widnows 7  and windows 8 or CD/DVD of the OS to be installed (Windows 7 or 8)
3. Administrator privileges on the PC that is being used

Process

In order to mount the ISO image of the OS, we need to first change the attributes of the pen drive to be used as the USB bootable medium of choice.

1. Go to the Search Box of your menu and type in “CMD”. You will find, among other results, Command Prompt.

2. Right click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator.

3. Now, type in Diskpart

4. Now, type in List Disk

Over here, you will find under the Disk category, all the physical drives that are connected to the PC. Almost always, Disk 0 will be the primary hard drive of the PC that you are using, following other hard drives that are connected. Find the Disk with the Size that is equivalent to the size of your pen drive. If you are unsure, then select that disk by pressing “Select Disk #”.

Now, type in “Detail Disk”. Here you will find information related to the disk selected and you can now verify this is indeed the disk you want.
Once you verify, then type in “Select Disk #” <where # is the number of the disk which corresponds with your pen drive>

5. Now, type in “Clean”, to format the drive with a new file system.

6. Once that is complete, then type in “Create Partition Primary”.

7. Once that is complete, now you can type in “Select Partition 1”

8. Type in “Active”, to put the selected partition in Active mode.

9. Now, we need to format the pen drive into File System Format. In this case, we will format the pen drive in the Fat32 file system.
Type in “Format fs=fat32”.

10. The format process will take some time. Sit back until it shows fully complete. Once it is complete, to fully activate it, type in “Assign”.

Now that your pen drive’s attributes have to been changed, here we can explain why we did such a procedure.

OS installation CD’s/DVD’s come with various files. One major file is the “Autorun.inf”, which contains Boot information. This file will bring up necessary options of the installation, when the CD/DVD is inserted. On a standard pen drive, the “Autorun.inf” file will not copy, due to pen drive limitations. But, with the above procedure, we have now changed the attributes of the pen drive to appear as a portable Hard Drive, which has no limitations for such files. So, copying the “Autorun.inf” file is now possible.

Depending on the source medium you want to copy the installation files from, the procedure will vary.

The following procedure is for copying installation files from a DVD.

1.

While at the Command Prompt window, after Assigning the pen drive, type in “Exit”. This will exit the Disk Partition process and enter standard mode. Now, type in the following command
“xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f k:\”
This command will copy the files from the destination drive that you have specified, “D:” being the DVD drive. Alternate the “D:” with the drive letter of your PC, to properly point to the source. The switches “/s/e/f” are used to specify the locations and folders that need to be copied from the source. Finally, the drive letter of the pen drive needs to be added, to give a destination for copying the files to.
Open up My Computer and search for “Removable Disk” and find the Drive letter and replace the “K:” with the drive letter.

2.

If the command has been entered correctly, you will see various files being copied one after the other. Once all the files have been copied, you may now type in “Exit” to leave the Command Prompt program. Open up My Computer once again and now you will find all the OS installation files you need in your pen drive.

That’s it! You’re done and ready to install the OS on another device!