How to make USB drive bootable using WinToFlash

WinToFlash is one of a great software to use for making a bootable pendrive and it’s mostly use to converts your Windows CD/DVD into a bootable usb drive in order to install your windows version through a pendrive or flash drive.

There was a time when WinToFlash can only supports the windows CD/DVD conversion to usb drive but that’s the history and from now on you can able to create your pendrive by an optical disc or either you can use an ISO image and that’s not it, there is also an another great feature which is recently added In this software that we can make our pendrive Multi-Bootable and makes it more comfortable and reliable to use. So, it’s all depending upon you which ones features is suitable for you to use.

OS installer usb disk is a type of bootable pendrive which we can use to install an operation system in our computer from a pen drive, it’s like installing Microsoft Windows on your computer. Use can make any pendrive bootable with any operating system setup stored in it as long you having right software for creating that operating system “.iso” image file bootable on your pendrive. You’ll definitely need some software to make a bootable usb pendrive of windows or Linux or maybe you can use cmd command prompt to make usb bootable but that’s limited for some versions of windows only.

Let’s make a bootable pendrive of an operating system –

1. Creating a windows bootable usb pendrive =) to make a pendrive of windows 7 or maybe some other version of windows then you’ll need some 3rd party software or either you can use command prompt to make that windows setup bootable on your drive. So, now you have two options to choose for your windows pendrive creation and you can use 3rd party software like Rufus or WinToFlash or either type some command on cmd, it’s all depending upon you and I’ve mention some tutorial about those software and cmd boot conversion process below.

Quick tips

• Use Rufus only when you’ve having an iso file of your windows version.
• Use WinToFlash if you want to make bootable usb by a windows cd/dvd disc.
• Cmd only make your windows vista/7/8/8.1 & 10 bootable in your drive and you can’t use all previous windows version like windows xp or 95 in this cmd boot conversion process.

WinToFlash can make your usb bootable by an optical disc or a disk image file of your bootable disc. Disk image is single file which contains all your copied disc data and it’s like having a single image file which was made from a bootable windows disk and we can use it to make another duplicate bootable disc or maybe we can make a bootable pendrive with it. WinToFlash supports all commonly used disk image format like .iso, .dmg etc. that’s why you won’t find any problem in disk image transfer.

The main window is very simple to use. As you can see in Figure A, you simply need to click the Windows Setup Transfer Wizard to begin.

Figure A

The Wizard will walk you through just a few simple steps to get you on your way.

Using the Wizard is not the only method. You can also click on the Task tab (Figure B) to set up the process.

Figure B

The default creation is Windows XP.

The first step is to select Windows 7 from the drop-down menu. You will notice that there are two Windows 7 choices: Windows 7 Pre-install Environment (PE) or Windows 7. If you install the PE, you will be able to get away with a smaller flash drive. The simplest method is to select the non-PE version. After you have made this selection, click the Create button to go to the next step.

The next screen is the Basic Parameters tab (Figure C), which is all you will need to configure for your installation.

Figure C

You cannot change either the USB drive type or the Format Type options.

The most important section on this window is the "setup files path" and the "USB drive" options. Make sure these are selected properly or you could wind up overwriting data on a drive you don't want to lose.

Also, on the Process Steps tab, you can select what steps you want to take place. From that tab you can select:

• Format drive
• Collect information of setup
• Create folders structure
• Copy files

It is best to leave all these steps checked, or else your installation might fail.

Once you have all your options configured, click the Create button on the Basic Parameters tab. When you click this button, you will have to accept the licensing terms and click Continue. The next window will warn you that all data will be lost. Go ahead and click OK and the process will begin.

The creation of the USB installation drive doesn't take too long (should take approximately 15-30 minutes — depending on the speed of your machine). When the process is finished, you will get an OK window, which you can dismiss.

When the process is complete, you can look at the contents of the USB drive (Figure D) to see that all the usual Windows install suspects are present and accounted for. Now all you have to do is insert the drive and boot the machine from USB to install Windows 7.

Figure D

The Windows 7 installation files are ready.

Final thoughts

WinToFlash has to be the easiest method of creating a bootable, installable copy of Windows on a flash drive I have ever used. This is definitely a keeper for your administrator tool kit.