Bootable USB flash drive for Windows 7

How to make a bootable USB flash drive for Windows 7 step-by-step!!!

Hello everybody, as in my previous post “Installing Windows 7 on a GPT HDD – Lenovo Z500“ I only indicated the fact that you need to create a bootable USB flash drive for Windows 7, in this one I will explain exactly how is this done, so there will be no doubts.

The actual process is really simple once you have the necessary tools for the job. In order to do this right, you need the following:

• an USB flash drive
• a Windows 7 ISO image
• a PC
• a small, free tool called Rufus

Once you have all this, creating a bootable USB flash drive is as easy as possible. For this post I used a 32 GB flash drive, but you can do it with a smaller size flash drive, depending on the OS that you want to make bootable. In this case my Windows 7 image is 3.8 GB, so it was necessary to have a bigger  than 4GB flash drive.

Download the Rufus free tool from here. Run the application and the result should look like this:

As you can see the tool automatically selects the USB flash drive. If you have more than one connected, you will have to select it manually.

In the “Partition scheme and target system type” field you have to select the type of formatting that your HDD has. The “File system” field I usually put it as NTFS. The “Cluster size” field can remain as it is.

In the “New volume label” field you can label your drive as you want, in my case I named it Windows 7.

In the “Format Options” field select everything as seen in the above image. Now all you have to do is  click the marked button, browse for your Windows 7 ISO image and click start. You will have to wait until all the files are copied on your portable memory  and then…TATA!!!… you will have your bootable USB flash drive for Windows 7.

All you have to do now is to modify in BIOS your boot settings, telling your computer to boot from USB instead of the HDD. Save this settings and restart your computer.

That’s all folks:-)