Sunday, January 25, 2009

Bootable USB Flash Drive

Reposting these instructions on making a bootable flash drive.

  • On a command prompt, run diskpart.
  • list disk
  • select disk 2 (Replacing 2 with the correct number!)
  • clean
  • create partition primary
  • select partition 1
  • active
  • format fs=fat32 quick (Note that fs=ntfs will NOT be bootable!)
  • assign
  • exit
  • robocopy /MIR [source drive] [destination flash drive]

In short, you create an active, primary partition on the drive (and you have to do this in diskpart, because the Windows UI doesn't support it) and then you copy the files from your Windows installation media to the drive. And here I always thought that this was something difficult!

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