How to Create a Bootable USB Drive for Windows 7 and 8

Hello, users and worldwide readers, here in this post, I intend to help you know “How to make a Bootable USB Drive for Windows 7 and Windows 8 ” All you need is a USB flash drive and a slight amount of patience to walk yourself through the process. In today’s fast changing world “Time is Money.” Thus, having a bootable DOS USB disk/drive will become handy to run legacy applications, Operating Systems and few updates which need the computer to be booted from USB or floppy disk unfortunately in Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. Physical DVD drives have become a thing of the past as the size of our PCs continues to shrink and new form factors have emerged.

Operating system will not allow creating bootable USB drive while formatting. They support only floppy disks in this method. Here is the simple guide about how to create bootable DOS USB disk in Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 by using third party application. Since we do not get the option to make MS-DOS bootable USB disk in Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, we will be using third party tool called ‘Rufus’ or “Novicorp”. It can create a DOS bootable USB disk, then you need to copy the other required files for the real purpose, like BIOS update files.

There are basically 2 popular methods to do the process. Let us see both the methods below:-

1st Method

How to Create a Bootable Windows USB Drive Using Rufus OR Novicorp

By using third party software like “Rufus or Novicorp”

There’s always an “easy way” to do things on Windows using some kind of software. Creating a bootable USB drive is also pretty easy – here’s how to do it:

1. Download Rufus or Novicorp from www.google.com (available for free)
2. Install and Open the Software
3. Once the user interface of the software opens up, plug-in your USB
4. After that, look for the “Create a bootable USB drive option” and from the drop-down, select an ISO Image
5. Then, click on the button next to the dropdown and select the Windows 10 ISO that you want to install
6. Lastly, click on “Start” and wait for the software to create the bootable USB drive.

That’s pretty much it. You now have a bootable USB drive, just plug it in your device and make sure your BIOS is all setup and you should now be able to easily install Windows 10 using the bootable USB drive that you just created. Now, let’s look at the Next Method.

2nd method

How to Create a Bootable USB Drive by using Command Prompt for Windows 7 and 8 | 8.1

To create a bootable USB drive manually, we will use the Command Prompt as a Windows default program. Here is the algorithm to create a bootable USB drive as the Windows installation media. To create a bootable USB drive as a Windows installation media, we require at least 4 GB for minimum capacity. Larger capacity is better. At this moment, I use the USB flash drive with 2 GB of capacity as just an example. It’s due to some reasons that my 4 GB flash drive encountered an unusual problem that I have to fix later.

1. Insert your USB flash drive to your running computer. As the first step, we need to run Command Prompt as administrator. To do this, we need to find cmd by typing ‘cmd‘ in the search box on Windows Start Menu. After search result for ‘cmd‘ appears, right-click on it and select “Run as administrator“.
2. Type ‘diskpart‘ on Command Prompt (without quotes) and hit Enter. Wait for a while until the DISKPART program run.
3. Type ‘list disk‘ to view active disks on your computer and hit Enter. There would be seen that the active disks shown as Disk 0for the hard drive and Disk 1for your USB flashdrive with its total capacity.
4. Type ‘select disk 1‘ to determine that disk 1 would be processed in the next step then hit Enter.
5. Type ‘clean‘ and hit Enter to remove all of the data in the drive.
6. Type ‘create partition primary‘ and hit Enter. Creating a primary partition and further recognized by Windows as ‘partition 1‘.
7. Type ‘select partition 1‘ hit Enter. After choosing the ‘partition 1‘ for setting up it as an active partition
8. Type ‘active‘ and hit Enter by activating the current partition.
9. Type ‘format fs=ntfs quick‘ and hit Enter. Then format the current partition as NTFS file system quickly
10. Type ‘exit‘ and hit Enter. Leaving DISKPART program but don’t close the Command Prompt instead. We would still need it for next process.

Once you’re USB flash drive has been made bootable, than you can copy the installation files for the OS you want to install. You can do this by drag and drop using preferred file manager/ explorer.

In Conclusion

So, that’s it! You have just learned to create a Windows 7, 8 | 8.1 bootable USB drive and it’s ready to install Windows on your device. Hope that you enjoyed reading “How to make a Bootable USB Drive for Windows 7 and Windows 8.”Creating a bootable USB drive is pretty easy, to be honest. I’d recommend following the easy way of creating the bootable USB drive if you’re not an expert – however, if you’re an expert, just follow the hard way of creating the bootable USB drive and avoid using any type of software.