As years go by, technology is really advancing. The era of optical discs is gradually fading and the new trend is USB flash drives. There are even laptops these days that don’t give you any option to use an optical disc.
The question is; if there is no CD Rom in the computer, how then do you run an installation? That is when a bootable USB comes in.
Most people can’t create bootable USB drives without using at least two different third-party software. That makes the whole process very bulky and tedious.
In this simple tutorial, I’m going to teach you how to create a bootable USB without any third-party software. It is very simple and easy.
Items you will need for this tutorial
*Working Windows PC/Laptop
*Pendrive 8GB and above
*Microsft Windows image
What you should understand
Windows 8.1 and 10.1 have a built in disc image mount software that is why you won’t be needing any third-party software at all. If your working PC is running on an earlier version of windows operating system, then you will need an extracting software or an image mounting software.
If you will go with extraction, then I recommend ‘Winrar‘ and if you are choosing an image mounter, then I will recommend ‘Power ISO‘. These software are paid versions but the limited free versions are good enough to complete the task.
The reason why you will need an 8GB pen-drive is because Windows 7 to 10.1 are more than 4GB when decompressed.
Follow the steps below to complete the tutorial
The default pen-drive file system is FAT32 but in order for it to be boot ready, the file system must be changed to NTFS. With this in mind, let’s see how we can change the FAT32 to NTFS while formatting the pendrive.
1.Slot your pen-drive into the USB port of your PC.
2. Click on the ‘Search’ icon on the task bar.
3. Type ‘Diskpart‘ in the search area and run as Administrator or hit ‘enter’ key and click ‘yes’ on the popup. Make sure to hit the ‘enter’ key anytime you type from here on.
4. Type in ‘List disk‘
Note: Depending on how many drives connected to your pc, you might see so many disks in the list. You can use the sizes to check for your pen-drive or you can disconnect all the disk leaving only the pen-drive connected.
5. Type in ‘Select disk X‘ (Xstands for your disk’s number as listed among the list of disks)
6. Type in ‘List partition‘
7. Type ‘Select partition 1‘
8. Type ‘clean‘
9. Type ‘Create partition primary‘
10. Type ‘format fs=ntfs quick’ (Here we changed the default file system to NTFS)
11. Type ‘active‘
12. Type ‘Assign‘
After this process, exit the ‘diskpart’ interface and mount your windows disc image. After mounting the image, you should be able to see all the files and folders in the image.
Open the pen-drive and copy all the files onto the pen-drive. Your bootable drive is ready right after the copy is successful.
If you can’t relate to the text above, you can watch the tutorial in the video below for more clarification.
This is the tutorial video
