Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10  

Sumit Dhiman said:

Hope the GIF works - you need to click the dropdown button.

If you right click on the image and select 'Open Link in New Tab' you can see this helpful graphic.

throkr said:

Hi,
I'm also a long time Rufus user but, a few days ago, I discovered an amazing piece of (portable) software: Ventoy.
Very easy to use, it works really well (the development started early April this year and now it has his first final version).
Big advantage: you can store (a lot of) different ISOs on the same USB Flash Drive (depending on it's capacity) as there is no need to unpack them; I even added a MacriumRescue.iso (as well as Win10 2004 - 20H1 ISOs) ...

It's definitely worth a look (and maybe @Brink could add it to this tutorial; just a suggestion ... ).
All infos and documentation can be found here .

I just wanted to share this, so thanks for reading !

Thanks for this - I have been looking for a tool that can create multi-boot USB for both BIOS and UEFI which Ventoy supports. I have used always used RUFUS for UEFI and Easy2Boot for legacy BIOS. RUFUS doesn't support multi boot and Easy2Boot works well with BIOS but is somewhat complicated for multi boot UEFI (I haven't tried). Ventoy requires that you copy your bootable ISO to the right directory and it should work for both BIOS and UEFI. Will try this when I have time and post my results.

Easy2Boot v2 can now boot to UEFI32 and UEFI64 and SecureBoot UEFI64 and directly boot from ISOs in a similar way to Ventoy. It can still switch-in .imgPTN images too and MBR-boot as before.

In Step #15 under Option Four, I'm curious about the use of 'Send To' in this context instead of 'Copy and Paste'.

Option Four: Manually create Bootable Windows 10 USB for Legacy BIOS and UEFI in Command Prompt

Online references say that with 'Send To', Windows passes the operation off to the target program which I don't fully understand in this particular situation.

BTW, this worked perfectly for my needs! Again big thanks to @Brink.

With time on my hands, I'm in the process of tiding up my MCT USB's and making imageUSB backups of those still relevant like 1909.

Hoping I have my facts straight on this, I prefer MCT created USB's to MCT iso's because I found they use a compressed install.esd instead of the larger install.wim on the ISO and therefore fit on a Fat32 formatted USB. This supports both legacy and UFEI having found it doesn't require me to turn off Secure Boot as it would with NTFS formatted USB's.

The 1909 MCT that was created at time, was on a 32GB disk, and I found that it's backup image, created by imageUSB, could only be re-imaged onto another 32GB disk. Therefore this process of 'Sending' the 1909 MCT files from the 32GB USB to a smaller 8GB disk, takes less space on the backup as well as providing more freedom in picking a USB size to re-image should the need arise.

Almost all USB flash drives under 64GB are already formatted as FAT32. Usually all I need to do to make them bootable is plug in the flash drive and from an elevated command prompt type:

BOOTSECT /nt60 <drive letter of flash drive>:

You may need to set the main primary partition on the flash drive as active with DISKPART first.

Then mount the Windows install ISO as a virtual drive and copy everything from the root of the install ISO to the root of the flash drive. The stick should be bootable as UEFI or BIOS.

Not a Number said:

Almost all USB flash drives under 64GB are already formatted as FAT32. Usually all I need to do to make them bootable is plug in the flash drive and from an elevated command prompt type:

BOOTSECT /nt60 <drive letter of flash drive>:

You may need to set the main primary partition on the flash drive as active with DISKPART first.

Then mount the Windows install ISO as a virtual drive and copy everything from the root of the install ISO to the root of the flash drive. The stick should be bootable as UEFI or BIOS.

The bootsect command is not required to make the USB flash drive bootable.

Berton said:

I just let the MCT process in creating the Bootable USB drive do its thing and reformat, wipes all existing data from it. All I would warn about is to use 32GB or smaller, made the mistake of using a 64GB and ended up with a 32GB partition and no access to the remaining space on it [limitation of 32GB with Windows].

You can create a second partition on the flash drive. You can also shrink the 32 GB partition the Media Creation Tool makes down to something like 6 to 8 GB and create an even larger second partition on the flash drive.