Making Bootable USB drives from Win7

In preparation, you will need a copy of the BOOTSECT.EXE program that's provided on the Windows 7 DVD/ISO in the 'Boot' directory.

Also the USB device to be used must:

• Be at least xGB in size
• Have no data on it that needs preserving (device will be wiped and formatted)
• Be capable of being configured as a bootable device (many cheap/free USB sticks do not work as bootable devices)

Prepare the USB memory stick
Within an elevated (administrator) command prompt, run DISKPART.

Within the diskpart prompts follow these steps:

LIST DISK

Once you enter the LIST DISK command, it will show the disk number of your USB drive. It will probably be the last in the list - you can tell by its size. Be careful, a mistake here will be disastrous for data on your other attached disk drives!

Let's suppose it's disk 4.

SELECT DISK 4 (Replace “4” with your disk number)
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK
(Format process may take few seconds)
ASSIGN
EXIT

By now, the drive should be viewable in Windows Explorer with an assigned drive letter.

So make it bootable.
Run the following at the command prompt for the BOOTSECT.EXE executable.

BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H: (where H: in this case is the USB drive)

And that's it! :) If this USB stick is for use in deployment of an configured operating system in MDT's Deployment Workbench, the entire contents of your source directory can then be copied using the following command.

robocopy {source path} H:\ /MIR /XD USMT5

The /XD switch above ensures that version 5 of USMT is not copied should it happens to be found in the source, and we don't require it (say, if doing USMT4 based migration from XP to 7).