Most people know how to create a bootable disk by burning the ISO images but this method has grown old. The USB drives have replaced the disks as they have convenient methods to install the operating system and are fast to use.
You might think that it is not possible to have a bootable USB drive without software, but it is. Microsoft provides the facility to a bootable USB drive without using any software. You just need the Command prompt and will be creating a boot USB drive in no time. Follow the steps given down and create one.
Steps To Create Bootable USB Drives Using Command Prompt
Step 1: Connect your USB drive to your PC.
Step 2: Go to the Start Menu. Find the command prompt by typing CMD. Right click on command prompt and select Run as Administrator option by clicking on it.
or, simply press Windows + R key > Type CMD and hit Enter.
Step 3: Type the command as given down and hit enter, wait until the diskpart utility starts running.
diskpart
Step 4: Type the command as given down and hit enter, it will show you all active disks on your PC.
list disk
Step 5: These 2 disks will show up most probably,
Disk 0 (Your PC hard drive)
Disk 1 (Your USB Flash Drive with is storage capacity). We will use Disk 1 to create the bootable USB Drive using CMD.
Step 6: Type the command as given down and hit enter, which allows you to do the operation on Disk 1.
select disk 1
It will display a message “Disk 1 is now the selected disk”.
Step 7: Type the command as given down and hit enter, to clean and format the USB drive completely.
clean
When the process gets completed, you see the message as “Diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk”.
Step 8: Type the command as given down and hit enter,
create partition primary
If it creates a partition a message will be displayed as “Diskpart succeeded in creating the specified partition”.
Step 9: Type the command as given down and hit enter, to choose partition 1 for setting it as an active partition.
select partition 1
Step 10: Type the command as given down and hit enter, to activate the currently selected partition.
active
Step 11: Type the command as given down and hit enter, it will format your currently selected partition as NTFS file system quickly.
format fs=ntfs quick
Step 12: Type the command as given down and hit enter, to close all the Diskpart programs.
exit
Copying Files from DVD To Bootable USB Drive Using CMD
Assuming that the USB drive is assigned with the letter G: and the DVD drive as E: and also inserted a DVD inside the DVD drive from which you want to copy the data to create a bootable USB drive via CMD.
Command Prompt’s active directory for Administrator permission is on C:WindowsSystem32
> which is set by default. Now we will set it on DVD(E:).
- Type E: and press enter, It will change the active directory to E.
- Type
cd boot
and press enter, It will change the active directory toE:boot
>. - Type
bootsect /nt60 g:
and press Enter. It will create the boot sector on G: drive (USB Flash drive). - Type exit and press Enter, It will close the command prompt.
Now we have created a bootable USB Drive successfully. It is ready to use as a boot media.
To install Windows from the boot media, copy the whole installation files which are on the DVD installer to the USB flash drive. follow the steps given down to do so.
- Open the command prompt using some of the steps given above.
- Type the command as copy
e:*.*/s/e/f/g:
and press enter. Wait till the copying process is completed. Note here e is the drive letter of the DVD drive and g is the letter for the USB drive.
So, there it goes. This is the easiest way to create a bootable USB Disk using command prompt without any software in Windows 10. There are a lot of tools available on the internet that claim to create bootable USB drivers for installing windows, but frankly, you don’t need them.
The so-called “tools” will only make the process more complex, if anything. You could simply make use of this easy method using the command prompt to make bootable USB Disk.