Making a Bootable USB with Windows 7

The steps are pretty easy to create a USB stick that boots up the Windows 7 setup from an ISO image, here is how.

Grab a Windows 7 ISO image and extract it to a folder (not on the USB stick) You can use a lot of programs, many of them free, to extract from an ISO. I use 7zip.

1. Grab a 4GB USB stick

2. Format the USB stick with NTFS using the "quick format". (You can do this via Windows Explorer)

3. Open a CMD prompt (run it as administrator)

4. Run DISKPART

5. Select the volume for the USB stick. First, enter LIST VOL to show the list.

6. Then enter SELECT VOL x where x is the volume number from the list

7. Mark the volume as active by entering ACTIVE

8. Enter EXIT to quit the DISKPART command line (but do not close the CMD prompt window)

9. In the CMD prompt window, go to the location where you extracted the Windows 7 files on your computer

10. Go into the BOOT folder

11. Type BOOTSECT /NT60 : where the drive letter is the USB drive.

12. Example BOOTSECT /NT60 G:

13. Copy all of the files you extracted for Windows 7 to the USB stick

14. On the computer, you want to install Windows 7, go to your BIOS and make sure that boot from USB is enabled and in the correct position in the boot sequence.

Once all files are copied to the USB stick, you can plug the USB stick into a computer and boot from it to run Windows 7 setup.