How to create a Bootable USB Drive 2019

You can create a bootable USB flash drive to use to deploy Windows Server Essentials. The first step is to prepare the USB flash drive by using DiskPart, which is a command-line utility.

To create a bootable USB flash drive

1. Insert a USB flash drive into a running computer.
2. Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator. To do this, You need to find cmd by typing ‘cmd‘ in the search box on Windows Start Menu. After search result for ‘cmd‘ appears, right click on it and select “Run as administrator“.
3. Type diskpart and hit enter
4. In the new command line window that opens, to determine the USB flash drive number or drive letter, at the command prompt, type list disk, and then click ENTER. The list diskcommand displays all the disks on the computer. Note the drive number or drive letter of the USB flash drive.
5. Type ‘select disk 1‘ to determine that disk 1 would be processed in the next step then hit Enter.
6. Type clean, and the click ENTER. This command deletes all data from the USB flash drive.
7. Type ‘create partition primary‘ and hit Enter. Creating a primary partition and further recognized by Windows as ‘partition 1‘.
8. To select the partition that you just created, type select partition 1, and then click ENTER.
9. Type ‘active‘ and hit Enter. Activating current partition.
10. To format the partition, type format fs=ntfs quick, and then click ENTER.
11. Type exit, and then click ENTER.

Step 2: Creating Boot Sector

Let us assume that the flash / USB drive is the D: drive and the DVD installer located on drive F :. The first step, we will navigate Command Prompt to set installation DVD as its active directory.

1. By default, Command Prompt’s active directory for Administrator permission is on C:\Windows\System32>. We will navigate Command Prompt to set on DVD (F:) as its active directory. Just type ‘f:‘ then hit Enter, and the active directory changed to F:.
2. Type ‘cd boot‘ and hit Enter. Active directory changed to F:\boot>.
3. Type ‘bootsect /nt60 d:‘ and hit Enter. Creating boot sector on D: drive (USB flash drive).
4. Type ‘exit‘ and hit Enter to close the Command Prompt. Until this step we have made a bootable USB drive sucessfully, and the flash drive is ready to be used as a boot media.

To install Windows from a bootable USB drive, You just need to copy the whole installation files contained on the DVD installer to flash drive. To do this, open the Command Prompt as in previous steps. Once it opens, type ‘xcopy f: \ *. * d: \ / E / H / F‘ and then press Enter. Wait until all the files in the DVD installer copied to the flash drive. Now bootable USB drive is ready to be used for installing Windows from flash drive