Of all the deployment options available, I think that the DVD
option is by far the least desirable. These discs are prone to issues from dust,
fingerprints and scratches. I have had many times bad installs from Windows XP as
it nears completion only to ended with errors to a bad disk.
With the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft changed the
way Windows installs and makes it easy to create a bootable USB which will
avoid all the issues with optical media.
In this tutorial I will show you how to create a bootable USB
drive using nothing but Windows built in utilities-Including DiskPart.
What you will need is a Windows 10 machine, Windows 10 ISO
and a USB drive- 8GB or bigger is good.
CAUTION-ALL DATA ON USB DRIVE WILL BE DESTROYED!
The first thing you want to do is open an elevated command
prompt by hitting the start button and typing CMD, right clicking on it and selecting run as
administrator. From here type in DiskPart to enter the DiskPart utility.
The next thing you want to do is get a list of all drives
connected to the computer. This is done by the command List Disk
You need to select the USB Disk to use, in this example it is
obvious what the disk number is. It is also a good idea to unplug any drives
that are plugged into the computer to avoid any chance of selecting the wrong
disk.
For this example, I will Select Disk 1 and continue.
I always list disk again, to verify the correct disk has been
selected. Here you can see the asterisk besides the selected disk.
Next, we need to wipe the disk clean, deleting all data. This
is done with the Clean command
After this is done, we need to create partition. For this I
almost always use the entire space available on the USB drive. This is done with
Create
Partition Primary
Next, we need to format the USB drive. This is done with the
format command. The usage of it is Format FS=NTFS Quick Label=”Windows10_x64_Pro”.
The syntax is straight forward. We are formatting the USB drive with the NTFS
file format quick with a label of Windows10_x64_Pro.
Some might say it is better to format with the Fat32 file
system, however I have been using this method for around 10 years or so and
have never had an issue with NTFS. You can use Fat32, I prefer to use NTFS.
Now for the last part, the most important step. I have seen
people forget this step and wonder why the computer will not boot from the USB
drive. In this step we must tell Windows to set the USB drive as active. This
is done by simply typing Active
After this is done, Windows should have assigned a drive
letter to the USB Drive automatically. This can checked by opening Windows
Explorer and verifying the USB drive is present. If it is not you can assign a
letter to the USB drive by using this command Assign letter=x Where x
is any free drive letter.
After this is done, you can type exit and or close the
Command Prompt window.
Now we need to copy the contents of the Windows 10 ISO to the
USB drive. To start, double click on the Windows 10 ISO file as this will open
and mount the ISO to a drive letter.
All that is left to do is select all the files and copy them to
the USB Drive. Once this is done you will have a bootable Windows 10 USB drive
ready to go.
