Create Bootable USB From ISO using Powershell

Muhammad FaizanSeptember 14, 2020 - Last Updated: March 17, 2024

1 4,812 2 minutes read

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Creating a bootable USB installer for windows could get very tricky sometimes, especially when you do not have internet access to download any software to create bootable media. Luckily Powershell is always available in most recent versions of windows, and it can get the job done without installing any additional software on your computer.

Requirements for Creating Windows Bootable USB

Mining 8GB of USB Flash Drive
Latest Version of Windows ISO File
Any version of Windows with Powershell 4 or above

Preparing USB

Once you met all the requirements mentioned above, its time to plug the USB flash drive into your computer and run the following command to get the drive number and other information related to the Flash drive.

Get-Disk | Where BusType -eq 'USB'

Note:- Make sure your USB flash drive is listed and write down the number of your USB Flash drive. We will need this information in the next command. In our case, the USB drive number is 3, but in your case, it could be the same or different.

Next, we will clear the USB Flash drive by running the following command.

Clear-Disk -Number 3 -RemoveData -Confirm:$false -PassThru

Formatting USB Flash Drive

Once the USB is cleared, our next step will be creating a partition and formatting it with the NTFS file system by executing the below command in Powershell console.

New-Partition -DiskNumber 3 -UseMaximumSize -AssignDriveLetter | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS

Note:- Once the format process is finished note down the Drive Letter assigned to the new partition and also make sure the new File System is NTFS.

Information: In my case, the E was assigned as Drive Letter for my USB Flash drive.

Mounting The Windows ISO File

After formatting the USB Flash drive with the NTFS file system, our next step will be mounting the Windows ISO file by running the following command.

Information: I am mounting Windows 10 ISO file, but it could be any Windows Operating System instead of Windows 10.

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath "c:\win10.iso"

Next, We will find out the drive letter assigned to our Windows ISO file by running the following command.

Get-CimInstance Win32_LogicalDisk | ?{ $_.DriveType -eq 5} | select DeviceID

Information: Note down the DeviceId (Assigned Drive Letter) will be needing it in the next command.

Coping Data From ISO To USB

Next, we run the xcopy command to copy everything from the mounted ISO file to Our USB drive.

Note:- Xcopy needs only two things source and destination. In the below command source is our mounted ISO file with the Drive Letter G, and the destination is our USB Flash drive with the Drive Letter E assigned to it. The last parameter in the command /e tells the xcopy command that I want to copy everything from source to destination.

xcopy G:\ E:\ /e

The copying process is started, and it will take some time to copy all the files to our USB flash drive, so sit back and relax.

Once all the files get copied to our flash drive, you can remove the now bootable USB flash drive and plug it where you want the Operating system to be installed and boot from the newly created bootable USB flash drive.

If you want to create a bootable flash drive using software instead of Powershell please have a look at the below article.

How To Create A Bootable USB Installation Media For Windows Server 2019