Create a bootable flash drive

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This tutorial shows how to prepare a flash drive as a boot drive. This can be useful to install windows on a machine with a broken optical drive.

 

 


 

Run CMD.EXE and type the following.  Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as "disk 1".  you should double check that by doing a list of the disks (type "list disk") before cleaning it.  If you have multiple hard drives, like an SDFlash drive or a Multibay drive, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command. 

1. diskpart
2. select disk 1
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

Now use XCOPY to copy disc contents to your flash drive, if you just use windows explorer it will skip some files.

XCOPY Tutorial.