Content and news by Robert Tanner and Rob Williams

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] For a long time, Microsoft didn't sell Windows install media in the form of bootable USB flash drives. Instead, it prefered to stick to old-school DVD media, despite the fact that many notebooks today are too small to even include an optical drive, and many DIYers are building PCs which forego one on purpose. However, things have moved on, and for the first time, Microsoft has begun to sell Windows 10 on pre-configured USB drives. Previous versions of the OS (XP, 7 and 8.1), all require the user to create their own bootable USB drive. Creating a bootable Windows USB drive used to be a chore, but today, one solution can pretty-well suit most people. However, there are times when a flash drive has some quirk that prevents it from working with a particular solution, so for that reason, this article takes a look at five different methods. Guide Index: USB Installer Tools & Successes Acquiring a Disc Image (ISO) Method 1 - Using Rufus Method 2 - UNetbootin Method 3 - Using Microsoft diskpart Method 4 - Microsoft Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool Method 5 - Windows 10 Media Creation Tool Windows XP Notes Common Problems Benefits of USB Install Media. Even if the target desktop or notebook has an optical drive, there are a couple of reasons to consider first creating a USB-based installer. Admittedly, the time and effort of creating the drive might make it best-suited for system builders, but for people like us, who juggle test machines, USB is a no-brainer. To start, USB media is more durable than disc-based media. Discs can be easily scratched, while well-built USB flash drives can generally handle a bit of abuse. Then, there's the convenience. Ever walk around with a disc in your pocket? It looks a bit odd. For us, performance and reliability are the key reasons why we've opted to use USB-based installers in lieu of discs, especially with USB 3.0 being much more common. Even if a DVD has been burned at the highest commercial speeds, it won't be able to compete with flash memory which offers far improved IOPS performance (operations per second) - it's the same reason why SSDs are much faster for booting an OS and loading applications than a mechanical hard drive; the seek times are minuscule in comparison. While it's beyond the scope of this article, those who truly want a fast install experience can slipstream USB 3.0 support into the install media, which on current chipsets and an SSD target can allow you to install Windows in under 4 minutes flat. USB Installer Tools & Successes. Over the course of this article, we're going to be looking at five different solutions that accomplish the exact same thing: Creating a USB-based Windows installer; if one doesn't work, the next one should (at least, that's the hope). To give an overview of what to expect from each solution, refer to this success table: Windows 10 Windows 8 Windows 7 Windows XP Rufus Yes* Yes Yes Yes UNetbootin Yes Yes Yes No diskpart Yes Yes Yes No Microsoft USB Tool Yes Yes Yes No Media Creation Tool Yes No No No * Requires Rufus 2.1.6 or later. Given the fact that Windows XP has reached end-of-life status and doesn't officially support installation over USB, we have to outline a number of problems and conditions in order to get it working. Windows XP over USB is still temperamental, and there is a good chance that it just won't work with your system, so please keep this in mind. For starters, modern UEFI-equipped machines are not designed to support such an old OS, so chances are that it will not even install, or even be detected in the first place. If the motherboard in question happens to support a legacy BIOS mode, then it might work. Different version of Rufus (explained later) have better luck with the XP process than others. We strongly suggest you skip to the dedicated part of this article that explains the problems with Windows XP and USB support. What about Windows Vista? Like Windows 7, 8, and 10, Vista too can be installed from USB media with these same methods, but due to that fact that most have moved on from it in favor of 10, it's not a big focus. We mentioned Rufus above, and that's the tool we're going to lead in here with, as we consider it to be the simplest to use, and the most effective. We discussed the same tool in an article from summer 2012 called 'Creating a Bootable DOS Flash Drive the Easy Way', as it allows for simple creation of bootable MS-DOS flash drives, as the title suggests. After the look at Rufus, we'll continue on to UNetbootin, Microsoft's diskpart (a tool built into Windows), a quick mention of another official Microsoft tool, but one the company no longer promotes for Windows 7 and 8, as well as the latest method, the Media Creation Tool. But first... Acquiring a Disc Image (ISO) Some solutions listed on this page require a Windows disc image (.iso) to be present. The exception is 'diskpart', as the disc's files will need to be transferred over manually (it doesn't matter if they come from a mounted ISO or a drive in an actual DVD-ROM). ISOs are available from a number of sources, but most people will acquire them after purchasing the OS online through Microsoft, or through some other related Microsoft service. If you don't have an ISO, or a disc for that matter, you'll need to acquire one from a friend or elsewhere on the web. If you're just looking to download Windows 10 as an ISO, you simply need to run the tool listed in step #5, and choose to save as ISO rather than to burn the image to a flash drive. Note that we can't really provide an MD5 for a Windows 10 ISO, as it changes every time it's downloaded through Microsoft's tool. Only the ISOs directly supplied by Microsoft would have static hashes. There are multiple editions of any given Windows version, but we're going to list the exact ISOs we used along with their MD5 checksums in case they prove useful. MD5 Checksums Windows XP Pro (Service Pack 3): F424A52153E6E5ED4C0D44235CF545D5. Windows 7 Ultimate (Service Pack 1): 56A26636EC667799F5A7F42F142C772D. Windows 8 Pro: 0E8F2199FAE18FE510C23426E68F675A. Windows 8.1 (MSDN; multi-version): CDADC5A76634651770A365F457702803. Please be careful where you source your OS image from, as most online sources will be pirated copies and/or bundled with extra (sometimes malicious) software. How the image was captured as well will have an effect on how the final boot drive turns out, so stick to official sources where possible. For those who have a Windows setup DVD, a free tool like CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn can be used to rip it into an .iso file. Other tools exist that accomplish the same thing, but these are the only ones we can personally recommend. For mounting an ISO image, we'd recommend Virtual CloneDrive, as it's free, and not the "free but a total nag" kind of free. NOTE: Some anti-virus applications might interfere with the USB creation process due to the autorun properties involved, so if issues are experienced, we'd recommend temporarily disabling the anti-virus until the process is complete. Using Rufus. Both Rufus and UNetbootin are simple tools for this task, and outside of Rufus' Windows XP support, both work just the same. However, we prefer Rufus because we find it loads a lot quicker, and feels a bit faster, too. For a great many reasons, this is still our preferred method of creating USB boot drives. With Rufus loaded up, choose the appropriate device that you want to turn into a boot drive, under the "Device" menu, and make sure that the file system is NTFS (not FAT32). The other options shouldn't matter too much, although if you're planning to install Windows 8 as an official EFI OS, you may wish to peruse the options under the "Partition scheme and target system type" menu. For Windows XP, select MBR Partition only. To load the Windows .iso file, the small CD icon to the right of "Create a bootable disk using:" option can be clicked. After perusing the file manager for the ISO image and accepting it, the "Start" button can be clicked to have the tool work its magic. NOTE: As the program will state, doing this will erase all data off of the flash drive - so backup first. If you have any issues, be sure to check out our Common Problems section below. Using UNetbootin. UNetbootin is a well-known tool as it's become a de facto choice for turning a bootable Linux live CD into a bootable Linux live flash drive - for that purpose, it still excels. Little do most people realize, it can handle Windows ISOs as well (but as the table at the top of this page shows, it doesn't support creating a bootable Windows XP drive). Like with Rufus, the appropriate drive should be selected from the "Drive:" menu at the bottom, and then the "..." button to the right of the largest text field can be clicked to search for and accept the required ISO. At this point, the "OK" can be clicked, and the process will get underway. Unlike Rufus, UNetbootin doesn't erase the flash drive first, so data remains intact - however, if you're repeatedly writing new ISOs to the drive using the tool, it's recommended you format after each one, so as to not leave unused scrap files around the drive. NOTE: We'd still recommend backing up personal data before writing an ISO to it just in case. Using Microsoft diskpart. For those who don't have an ISO, but rather a DVD, diskpart is the solution for you. It does require some command-line usage, but as you'll see, it's not too complicated. NOTE: This method will delete the entire flash drive, so be sure to back up personal data first. To make proper use of diskpart, you'll need to open a command prompt with administrator rights (head to "Start", type in 'cmd', right-click it, and choose 'Open as Administrator'). Once the prompt is opened, type in 'diskpart' to load the tool, and then 'list disk' to figure out which # relates to your flash drive. External storage should appear at the end of the list, and in our case, it did (we're using a 32GB flash drive, which...

Content and news by Robert Tanner and Rob Williams

Creating Bootable Windows XP, 7, 8 & 10 USB Flash Drive Installers