- #How to make a usb drive bootable on windows 7 software
- #How to make a usb drive bootable on windows 7 iso
- #How to make a usb drive bootable on windows 7 windows 7
If you’re comfortable navigating folders in DOS, then you can skip this particular step. Now we’re going to go back to our extracted “7012-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD” gobbledygook folder and open the “boot” folder, inside which we’ll find a file called “bootsect.exe” that we’ll need to use. You can check the Quick Format box, too, if it’s not already checked. Right click on the drive and choose “Format…” Then, we want to format the drive using the NTFS file system with the default allocation size, so make sure those two things are selected from the dropdown menus. In this instance, we’re dealing with the F: drive. Head into “Computer” or “My Computer” and locate your USB thumb drive. I’ll continue to refer to this folder as “the gobbledygook folder” for the rest of this guide. When the smoke has cleared, you’ll have a gobbledygook folder on your desktop. Right-click on that file and choose “Extract to ” as shown in the above picture.
#How to make a usb drive bootable on windows 7 windows 7
Once Windows 7 Beta has finished downloading, you should see a file on your desktop with a bunch of gobbledygook in the name like “7012-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD” or something cryptic like that.
#How to make a usb drive bootable on windows 7 iso
Step Three: Extract the Windows 7 ISO file Head over to and click on the WinRAR 3.80 link to download the software.
#How to make a usb drive bootable on windows 7 software
I promise this will be the only third-party software that you’ll have to download and install, though, and it’s a great program to have on your computer anyway if you don’t already. I hate guides that make me go download a bunch of software just to accomplish a task, so I apologize for making you do the same thing. The download might take a while depending on your connection speed – set aside an hour to be on the safe side. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll assume that you’ll download the ISO file to your desktop.
Head over to and jump through all the hoops to begin your download. It’s all pretty easy once you get going, so let’s begin. I found a SanDisk Cruzer Contour worked best, while a Kingston DataTraveler was a bit fidgety at first but worked after a couple of tries. The only tangible thing you’ll need is a USB thumb drive with at least 4GB of capacity. There are plenty of great tutorials out there that basically contain the same information as this one, but I thought I’d try to put together a how-to guide that made everything as simple as possible for people who might like the idea of Windows on a thumb drive but aren’t necessarily super comfortable with the actual process. Creating a bootable USB thumb drive with Windows 7 loaded onto it is more complicated than it needs to be, but once it’s done it’s a great tool to have.
Half of my computers don’t have optical drives and I don’t want to buy an external one.ģ. I hate waiting for DVDs to burn ISO images.Ģ. I’ve been playing with Windows 7 Beta for a the past week or so and after loading it up on multiple machines I’ve learned a few things:ġ.