How to make a bootable USB in Windows 7 / WinPE

How to make a USB stick bootable?

Well, making a normal USB drive as a bootable USB drive is very easy and simple.

If the host system is on Windows 7 or Windows vista then we can use the command prompt to make the USB Bootable. We do not need any other tools. Or if you are using any other OS, use WinPE CD to boot into windows PE then from the command prompt launch the DISKPART.

In this example, we will identify the drive and volume then we will format the drive then make it bootable.

First, launch the command prompt as Administrator, then on the command prompt type Diskpart

Then type list disk to view all attached disks on the system

We have 3 disks online / attached to the system. I want to select the 1911 MB drive and want to make it bootable.

So, to select Desk 2 type select disk 2

Now, On Disk 2 create a partition by typing Create partition primary

Above command will create a primary partition.

Note: if you want to make one partition then we don’t need to define the size here.

But if you want to make multiple partitions then the command will be like below

Create partition primary size=<size_in_MB>

For the partition we should assign a drive letter by Assign letter=F

Then we should make this drive bootable by typing  Active

Now finally we need to format the drive with desired file system.

So here we will format with NTFS Quick and label the drive USB. We can do this by using following command:

Format FS=NTFS QUICK label=USB

That’s it.

Now the USB drive is bootable.