Install Windows 10 from USB Drive

How to Install Windows using USB Flash Drive

We are in the era of micro computing where things are getting smaller in size and yet effective be it Mobile Phones/Laptops/Storage Devices etc. We have been seeing significant reduction on their size and dimensions however they are still more effective than they used to be earlier.

In new generation Laptops there are competition in the market to produce as slim/thin/compact laptop as possible which resulted in removal of several I/O Ports and Devices like LPT/Serial Ports, Floppy Disk Drive, CD/DVD Disk Drive etc.

On the Laptops without CD/DVD drive if we need to install fresh operating system (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016 etc) then we need to have either External USB CD/DVD drive or a USB Bootable Flash drive with Windows OS image on it.

There are several tools available out there on the Internet which enables us to create Bootable USB Flash drive but thankfully there are no tools needed if we have a system running Windows 7 or above with a CD/DVD image (ISO) to prepare a Bootable USB Flash Drive and here are the instructions:

Things Needed

1 : USB Pen Drive, 4 GB or above.

2 : A System running Windows 7 or above.

3 : Installer CD/DVD Image (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10)

4 : Virtual ISO Mount tool (get one from here) (Optional**)

Insert USB drive in any of the working USB port on your system running Windows 7 or above.

Open Portable WinCD Emu.exe (Downloaded from above) and mount the ISO image of Windows Installer Disk. remember the drive letter. (ex: D:)

Open Command Prompt as Administrator (CMD Run As Admin).
Diskpart
List Disk
Select disk (x) #Enter the number from above command output for the Flash Drive
Clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign letter=v
exit
xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f v:

The last command will start copying files/folders from the mounted installer disk to USB Flash drive.

Wait for it to complete and once it does, the USB Flash drive will be ready to work as a Windows Installation media.

Boot your target computer and make sure the first boot device is set as USB Drive /USB Removable disks.

Good Luck...

Please post in comments below for any questions or comments you may have.

** While performing the steps on Windows 10 it is not needed as an ISO file can simply be mounted by double clicking the ISO file.