How to Prepare a Bootable USB Flash Drive?

Some of you guys might have heard that you can turn your USB flash drive into a bootable storage media and use it exactly the way you use bootable CDs or DVDs to install Operating Systems. In this how to guide, I’ll show you how you can turn your normal USB flash drive into a bootable USB Flash drive. Before you proceed with the steps; make sure you have access to a Windows Vista
or a Windows 7 machine. The reason for these specific Operating systems is that these two versions of Windows, includes updated version of Microsoft’s DiskPart utility. In windows XP
these steps may not work!

* Connect the USB Flash drive to USB drive
* Click on Start – > Accessories and hover at Command Prompt.

Hover over Command prompt

• Right click on the Command Prompt and click on Run as administrator.

Right click and select Run as administrator

• Type diskpart and press the Enter key. This will start the built in Windows disk partitioning utility.

diskpart

• Type list disk and press Enter to determine which disk is your USB Flash drive..

List disk

• As you can see in the above screenshot, my USB Flash drive is listed as Disk 7. Remember it!
• Type select disk 7 and press Enter to select the USB Flash drive.

Select disk

• To clean the connected USB Flash drive, type clean and press Enter.

Cleaning the disk

• Type create partition primary and hit Enter.

Creating primary partition

• Type select partition 1 and press Enter to select the only partition created on the USB Flsh drive.

Selecting partition 1

• To make the selected partition active, type active and press Enter.

Activating the partition

• Now you need to format the USB Flash drive. Type format fs=fat32 and press Enter to format the partition using the FAT32 file system.

Format the partiton

• Type assign to assign a drive letter.
• Type exit and you are done!

Now as you have successfully turned your USB Flash Drive into a bootable storage media, put the Operating System CD/DVD in your computer’s DVD drive and Copy all the files from DVD to the USB Flash drive. To install the OS from your Flash drive, reboot your machine and enter into the BIOS setup. Select your first boot device as USB Removable drive or something like that . (option texts may vary in different BIOS versions).