Creating a Bootable USB Flash Drive :
We face lot of problem when we have to reinstall windows on our computer or laptop. First thing we have to decide by which medium we have to install windows? The options available to us are DVD or USB Pendrive. In the latest new netbooks, mostly there is no DVD drive. So if you want to install windows you have to go with the other option, i.e. USB Pendrive.So here I’ll teach you how to make your USB pendrive bootable.
Steps to make your USB Flash Drive Bootable :
1.Run command prompt (cmd) by clicking start and typing typing cmd in Windows 7 and In Windows XP by clicking on start and then clicking on run. Type cmd and run. This will open the command prompt which will look like this:
then type “cd..” 2 times to make it look like:
2.Then run diskpart utility from command prompt, by typing ‘diskpart’ on command prompt and pressing enter. This will run the diskpart utility in a another windows, which is shown in 2nd picture below:
3) Now insert your pendrive in a USB port. Your pen drive must be atleast 4 GB but 8 GB pendrive is best for this purpose. Now go back to the diskpart console and type ‘listdisk’ and press enter. This will list the various storage devices available. You can see the size column of the disk and here by seeing the size of disk you can confirm that which is your pendrive but here in our picture we can see that ‘disk 2′ is our pen drive. In our case it is ‘disk 2′.
4) Then you have select disk 2 by typing ‘select disk 2′ and then pressing enter. Note: in our case it is disk 2, in your case it may be disk 3, or disk 1 or any other number. You can enter ‘detail disk’ to see the details of the disk after selecting it to verify that you have selected the correct disk. You can see these steps in the image below:
5) Then you just have to run a series of various commands. The commands should be run in a order as shown below:
– clean
– clean
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- active
- format fs=fat32
These steps is diskpart window are shown in the image below:
6) The format step will take few minutes. After the completion of format you have to run ‘assign’ command. And after this you can exit diskpart utility by using the ‘exit’ command. The steps are shown below:
- assign
- exit
in the figure:
7) After the pend drive is formatted completely, put in your original Windows 7 DVD in your DVD drive, or if you have an .iso image of the DVD, mount that image using any virtual drive software like Power ISO or MagicDisk.
- Now go to My Computer, and open the contents of DVD Drive. Press ‘ctrl+a’ to select all contents and copy all the contents by pressing ‘ctrl+c’.
- Now go back to My Computer and open the USB Drive and press ‘ctrl+v’ to paste all the contents of DVD into the USB Pendrive Disk.
After the completion of copy phase, you are almost done just remove the USB Drive safely and now you can use this USB Pendrive to install Windows 7 in your computer/laptop.
