Bootable USB Creator: Easily Make USB Drive Bootable in Windows PC

“How do I make a USB drive bootable to run OS from it?”

Hey, guys. I have a preinstalled Windows 10 32bit computer. And I am trying to create a bootable USB drive with OS installed on. Then I can carry it around to boot my own operating system from USB on any compatible device. Could you offer an elaborate explanation of how to do it step by step? Thanks!

Choose a reliable bootable USB creator

Many Windows users are eager to make a bootable Windows USB drive and boot their customized OS from it on any computer. For this demand, Microsoft develops the “Windows To Go” feature for Windows 10 Education/Enterprise/Pro and Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise users. If you are running those operating systems, you can try it to burn ISO to USB drive and make the USB bootable.

However, this function also requires a USB that is larger than 32GB and certified by Microsoft, otherwise, you will fail to make a bootable USB from ISO. Thus, you might want to use a more powerful bootable USB making tool to make a bootable USB flexibility. Here we recommend using AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

Advantages over Microsoft “Windows To Go”:
★Allow you to create a bootable USB drive on all editions of Windows 10/8/7 and Windows XP/Vista (32 bit and 64 bit).
★Not require a certified USB drive which is over 32GB.
★Support creating a bootable USB drive from ISO/system disc, as well as making a bootable Windows USB drive with the current system.

4 Steps to create a bootable USB in Windows 10/8/7

In the last section, we have mentioned that AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro provides two methods to make a bootable USB drive. Here we will take how to make a bootable USB from ISO as an example.

Preparation work:
①Prepare an empty USB drive. To speed up the process, a USB 3.0 drive and computer with a USB3.0 port are recommended.
②Download the Windows ISO files from the Microsoft official site.
③You can download the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Demo version first and give it a try.

Step 1. Plug the prepared USB drive in your Windows 10 computer and verify it is detected successfully. Run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click “Tools” in the top toolbar, and choose “Windows To Go Creator”.

Step 2. Here we choose the first option "Create Windows ToGo for personal computer".

Step 3. Choose "Create Windows ToGo with system disc/ISO" and select the prepared ISO files, then hit on "Next".

Step 4. In the subsequent window, choose the USB you plan to use. Then click the "Proceed" option to start making a bootable USB from ISO.

If you have don’t have prepared Windows ISO files, you can choose the second method in "Step 3" to create Windows bootable USB with current system.

Bonus info: create bootable USB for Windows repair or install

With the above bootable USB creator, you can also make a bootable USB drive for dealing with the Windows boot failure. When you cannot boot your OS as normal, you can use the "Make Bootable CD Wizard" to make a bootable USB drive on another working computer.

Then you boot your computer with a boot failure from the bootable drive, To repair the startup problems, you can try to rebuild MBR on the system drive, or check bad sectors on the main hard drive.

If you need to install Windows and you don’t have access to an installation CD/DVD drive, a bootable USB drive is a great solution. You can boot to the USB drive, using it to run the OS setup program, just like a CD or DVD. For this task, you need another different bootable USB creator- Windows USB/DVD Download Tool.

Step 1. Download, install and run Windows USB/DVD Download Tool.

Step 2. In the “Source file” box, click “Browse” and select the file from the OPEN dialog box. Click “Next”.

Step 3. Select “USB Device” to create a copy on a USB flash drive.

Step 4. Then choose your USB drive in the drop-down list and click “Begin copying”.

When your Windows ISO file is copied to your drive, install Windows by moving to the root folder of your USB drive, and then double-click Setup.exe.

Summary

No matter why you need to create a bootable USB drive, you can find a great bootable USB creator tool or method in this post. It is worth to mention that AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is far more than a bootable USB device creator for Windows 7/8/10. It also has many other functions like splitting partitions, extending NTFS system drive without reboot, converting (system) disk between MBR and GPT partition table, etc..

If you want to create Windows Server bootable USB drive to get a portable Windows Server or troubleshoot boot issues, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Server edition.