How To: Create a Bootable USB Pen Drive

Nowadays many laptops are coming without a CD/DVD Drive and users are unable to install new operating systems. Here is a tutorial on How to Make a Bootable USB so that you can install any operating system easily.

To make the Pen Drive Bootable just follow the steps below:-

1) Run command prompt (cmd). This can be done by clicking start and typing typing cmd in Windows 7. In Windows Xp, click on start and then click on run. Type cmd and run. This will open the command prompt which will look like this:

2) Then run diskpart utility from command prompt, by typing ‘diskpart’ on command prompt and pressing enter. This will run the diskpart utility in a separate windows, which is shown in 2nd picture below:

3) Now put in your pendrive in a USB port. Your pen drive must be atleast 4 GB, 8 GB pen drive is best for this purpose. Now go back to the diskpart console and type ‘list disk’ and press enter. This will list the various storage devices available. You can see the size column of the disk and here we can see that ‘disk 2′ is our pen drive. Warning: In your computer it may be some other number. In our case it is ‘disk 2′.

4) Then you have to type ‘select disk 2′ and press enter. Note: in our case it is disk 2, in your case it may be disk 3, or disk 1 or any other number. You can enter ‘detail disk’ to see the details of the disk after selecting it to verify that you have selected the correct disk. You can see these steps in the image below:

5) Then you have to run a series of commands. The commands to be run in the order are:-

• clean

• create partition primary

• select partition 1

• active

• format fs=fat32

These steps are shown in the image below:

6) The format step will take some time. You can have a tea or coffee in the meantime and come back. After the format is complete you have to run ‘assign’ command. And after this you can exit diskpart utility by entering the ‘exit’ command. The steps are shown below:

• assign

• The image below shows all the steps taken from the first step:

7) After the format is complete,Open the iso file of the operating system you want to install with the help of Daemon Tools.

• Now go to My Computer, and open the contents. Press ‘ctrl+a’ to select all contents and copy all the contents by pressing ‘ctrl+c’.

8) When the copy finishes, you are done just remove the USB Drive safely and use it to install the operating system in your computer/laptop.