How To Create Bootable USB Without Any Software In Windows 10 (Using Command Prompt)

These days very few people burn ISO images on disks and use them as bootable media. Now, USB drives have replaced them as they are faster and a more convenient method to install an operating system on a machine.

While there are many tools to make a bootable USB drive, there’s one provided by even Microsoft; there’s a way to do the same without any software. All you need to do is fire up Command Prompt and follow some simple instructions. Let’s take a look at it.

Create Bootable USB without any software on Windows 10 (Using CMD)

To create your bootable USB with the help of CMD, first, you need to format the USB drive using diskpart.

1. Insert your USB flash drive into your computer.
2. Open Start Menu and type CMD to find Command Prompt. Right click on Command Prompt and click Run as Administrator.
   • Alternatively, you can also open the Command Prompt by pressing Windows+R > Type CMD > Press Enter.
3. Once the Command Prompt window appears, type diskpart and hit enter. Wait until the diskpart utility starts running.
4. In the new diskpart window, type list disk and hit enter. It will show you all active disks on your computer.
5. Most probably, you will see two Disk types.
   • Disk 0 is for the hard drive and,
   • Disk 1 is for your USB Flash Drive with its total capacity.
6. Since we are going to work on to create bootable USB using CMD, we will work with Disk 1.
7. Type select disk 1 in the same window and hit Enter. You will get a message ‘Disk 1 is now the selected disk’. That means, any further operation that you do will affect your disk 1 directly.
8. Type clean and hit Enter to remove all of the data in the USB drive. Clean command will format your bootable drive. You will get a message like ‘Diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk’.
9. Type create partition primary and hit Enter. You will get a message like Diskpart succeeded in creating the specified partition.
10. Type select partition 1 and hit Enter. It will choose partition 1 for setting up it as an active partition.
11. Next, type active and hit Enter. It will activate the current partition.
12. Now, type format fs=ntfs quick and hit Enter. This command will format your current partition as NTFS file system quickly.
13. Type exit and hit Enter. Exit command will close the Diskpart program but it doesn’t close the CMD window.

Copying files from an ISO image on your PC/DVD to bootable USB manually:

All you need to do is open the files inside the DVD or ISO, copy them, and paste them into USB storage manually. This will make your USB drive bootable in Windows 10 (and older versions).

Also, check out our article on how to format corrupted sd cards easily and regain access to your lost data.

Copying files from a DVD to bootable USB using CMD:

Let us assume that the USB drive is the G: drive, and the DVD drive has been assigned the letter E. You also have inserted a DVD inside the DVD drive from where you want to copy the data to create a bootable USB drive via CMD.

By default, Command Prompt’s active directory for Administrator permission is on C:\Windows\System32>. We will navigate Command Prompt to set on DVD (E:) as its active directory. Remember there should be a DVD inside the DVD drive.

1. Just type E: then hit Enter, and then the active directory is changed to E.
2. Type cd boot and hit Enter. Now the active directory is changed to E:\boot>
3. Type bootsect /nt60 g: and hit Enter. It will create the boot sector on G: drive (USB Flash drive).
4. Type exit and hit Enter to close the Command Prompt.

We have successfully created a bootable USB drive until this step, and the flash drive is ready to be used as boot media. Also, if you want to learn how to create bootable usb on ubuntu, check out our linked article.

To install Windows from a bootable USB drive, we just need to copy the whole installation files on the DVD installer to the USB flash drive.

• To do this, open the Command Prompt as in previous steps.
• Once the command prompt is open, type copy e:\*.* /s/e/f g: and then press Enter. Wait until all the files in the DVD installer are copied onto the flash drive. Please double-check the drive letter of your USB and DVD. Here, here e is the drive letter of the DVD drive that holds the Windows DVD, g is the drive letter that you assigned to the external USB Stick.

So, this is how you can make a bootable USB drive without software that is ready to be used for installing Windows 10. Meanwhile, you can also read our article to learn how to perform the ping of death command.

You can also use the Media Creation Tool

Not everyone likes walking the longer path when there’s a simple shortcut for the above method. Some of the other techniques that you can use are the Media Creation Tool, or you can also use some of the top tools that you can use to create a Windows 10/11 bootable ISO for free.