John Quirk's Blog

We’re building a load of laptop kit. Problems with the WAN make PXE booting impossible for now, and the laptops don’t have optical drives. Obviously a USB Flash boot disk is the answer. It’s worth a quick note as to how to create these:

Insert the USB Stick into a computer running the Vista or Windows 7, then use diskpart:

diskpart

select disk 2^*

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=fat32

assign

exit

Now create Task Sequence media boot ISO. Mount the ISO and copy the contents to the USB stick.

Easy as that!

*NB: The value of disk 2 is the USB Stick’s disk ID. You can find this in Disk Manager.