Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive in Windows Vista/7
Great news! Gone are the days of rummaging through piles of junk to find a bootable floppy disk, not to mention a floppy disk drive, just to create a bootable USB flash drive. The Windows Vista and Windows 7 DISKPART command line utility can now create bootable partitions on a standard USB flash drive.
Step 1
Start the Command Line as an Administrator (right-click on the Command Line shortcut and choose "Run as Administrator") and type diskpart to start the DISKPART utility.
Step 2
Type list disk to show a table of all the drives available on your computer. On my computer the following table is shown:
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt -------- -------------- ------- ------- --- --- Disk 0 Online 465 GB 0 B Disk 1 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 2 Online 3875 MB 0 B
Step 3
It is necessary to identify which disk number represents the flash drive, usually by comparing the size listed in the table to that of your flash drive. My flash drive in the above example is a 4GB drive, so I can safely assume that Disk 2 is the flash drive.
Step 4
Type select disk <diskNumber> (where <diskNumber> is the number previously identified, in my case 2).
Step 5
Type clean.
Step 6
Type create primary partition.
Step 7
Type select partition 1.
Step 8
Type active.
Step 9
Type format fs=ntfs.
Step 10
Type exit.
That's it—your flash drive is now bootable.
