Create bootable USB drives of Windows installation CD’s in Linux

Linux

Author

Vinh Nguyen

Published

January 16, 2011

Nearly all netbooks and many laptops don't come with an optical storage drive (DVD/CD). To re-install an OS, one would need to boot it from a USB drive. In this post, I outline how I could create a bootable usb drive for a Windows 7 disc. The information was taken from a reply on this post. I assume the usb drive is /dev/sdb on the Linux machine. ms-sys is required.

## Run under root
cfdisk /dev/sdb
mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sdb1
mount -o loop win7.iso /mnt/iso
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
cp -r /mnt/iso/* /mnt/usb/
ms-sys -7 /dev/sdb