Burning a bootable USB flash drive. Writing an iso image to a USB drive (creating a bootable flash drive)
All the best!
Quite often you need to record some image ISO disk to a flash drive, for example, when installing Windows, when creating an emergency flash drive, for, hard drive etc.
Moreover, the same installation of Windows from a CD/DVD takes longer(and they fail more often than flash drives). Not to mention the fact that not every new PC/laptop has a disk drive installed. That is why using a flash drive is preferable (and more universal - it can be connected to any PC with a USB port).
In this article, I will look at a couple of programs that can easily and quickly burn any disk image in ISO format to a USB flash drive.
Note: ISO is the most popular format disk images. More than half of all possible images are distributed in it.
Burning an ISO image to a USB flash drive
Method No. 1 - PowerISO
PowerISO - very powerful program for working with ISO images. Allows you to open them, edit them, extract files from them, add files to ISO images, compress them, burn them to CD/DVD disks and flash drives, etc. Also in PowerISO you can make an image of any of your disks, test it, get checksum(to assess whether the file is broken...).
In general, how to write an image to a flash drive using PowerISO.
1) The first thing you do is open the image. To do this, click the button "Open", or open the file menu, and then specify the image file. You can also use keystrokes Ctrl+O.
2) If the image was opened and the program did not issue any warnings, go to the menu "Tools". Select a feature such as "Create bootable usb drive unit" (see arrows in the screenshot below).
3) In some cases, the program will ask you to give it administrator rights. We just agree: the program will restart and you will continue the recording process.
4) In the recording settings window, you need to:
- in the column "USB drive" indicate your flash drive (Caution! Do not mix up the letters, because during the recording process, all data on the flash drive will be deleted;
- recording method: if you are recording boot image ISO - choose recording method "USB - HDD"(for example, for recording images from Windows);
- the file system column can be left as default;
- next click "Start";
- By the way, please note that at the bottom of the window there are links to instructions (several links, depending on the image being recorded).
Burn Settings // PowerISO
5) The program will warn you again that all data on the selected flash drive will be deleted!
- loading your PC with extraneous tasks (I recommend turning off everything unnecessary: by at least, torrents, games, video editors, etc. programs that heavily load the PC);
- size of the recorded image;
- speed of the USB drive and the flash drive itself.
7) If the recording went well and without errors: you will see a message "USB recording drive completed successfully" , as in the screenshot below.
Method number 2 - UltraISO
UltraISO is the most famous program for working with ISO images. It can do almost everything the same with them as the first one: open, mount, edit and change, write bootable flash drives, external hard disks, CD/DVDs, etc.
It is as easy to use as the first one. Both, by the way, fully support the Russian language.
And so, let's start working in UltraISO
1) First, download (link above), install and run the program. There is nothing special to comment here, except for one thing - run the program as an administrator (otherwise the option to write a USB flash drive may not be available!).
Note! To run as administrator: just click on the UltraISO program icon - and in context menu select "Run as administrator" as shown in the screenshot below.
3) If the image has opened, open the menu (see screenshot below).
4) Then you need to set the recording settings:
- disk drive: select the letter of your flash drive (the data on it will be deleted, so be careful and attentive!)
- recording method: either USB-HDD+ or USB-HDD (this is for the record bootable media, which is what is required in most cases) . It’s quite difficult to say specifically what to choose; in most cases, USB-HDD+ works - but if suddenly your BIOS version will not see it, rewrite the flash drive in USB-HDD mode;
- then click the button "Record" .
Note! IN normal mode UltraISO automatically formats the media to the FAT32 file system (even if the flash drive was previously NTFS). In order for NTFS to remain, you need to select ExpressBoot, then click on ExpressWrite. Result: when unpacking the image onto a flash drive, file system will remain unchanged.
6) If everything went well, you will see the following message in the program message: "Cache synchronization. Writing complete!" . Please make sure that there are no errors in the list of program messages, otherwise your boot image will simply throw an error when Windows installations(For example ).
An example of a successful recording is shown in the screenshot below.
After burning the flash drive, they usually proceed to install Windows...
All the best to everyone.
You have ISO file you want to a flash drive or other USB storage device. You should also be able to boot from it. Sounds simple, right? Copy the file to it and you're done!
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Properly burning an ISO to USB is different than just copying the file. It's even different than burning an ISO to a disc. The difficulty is that you plan to boot from a USB drive, and to do this you need to create boot records On him.
Fortunately, there are many free tools that allow you to automatic mode create boot drive. We'll look at how to do this using free program Rufus.
Note: Burning an ISO image file to USB devices typically takes less than 20 minutes, but the total time varies greatly depending on the size of the image and the performance of the drive.
How to Burn an ISO File to a USB Drive
Step 1Download Rufus – free tool, which will help you properly prepare your USB drive, will automatically extract the contents of the ISO image and correctly copy the files it contains to your USB device, including any files in the ISO needed to make it bootable.
Rufus is portable program(no installation required), works on Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP and allows you to burn an ISO image file to any type of storage device.
Step 2
Double click on the downloaded file. The utility will be immediately ready for use.
Step 3
Connect the flash drive or other USB device to your computer that you want to burn the ISO file to.
Step 4
Attention: Burning an ISO image to a USB drive using this program erases all data on the disk! Make sure your USB drive is empty or that you have backups everyone important files from him.
Step 5
From the drop-down list of devices at the top of the program window, select the USB drive to which you want to burn the image.
Note: The utility shows the size of the USB device, its volume letter free space on disk. Use this information to ensure you select the correct device.
Note: If the USB drive is not in the list of devices, then the problem may be with the drive itself. Try reconnecting it to another USB port or to the port directly at motherboard(if you are using a USB hub).
Step 6
Below you can specify the volume label, cluster size and file system. In most cases, we recommend leaving this value at its default.
Step 7
In the "formatting options" section, you can check the "check device for bad blocks" option if you have concerns that there may be a problem with the drive.
Step 9
When the "Open" window appears, select the ISO image that you want to burn to the flash drive and click the "Open" button. Wait while Rufus checks the ISO file you selected. This usually takes a few seconds.
Note: if you see the message “Unsupported ISO”, then in this case, try using another program or downloading another image, since Rufus will not be able to burn the file. This error occurs when opening a damaged or non-ISO image.
Step 10
Click the Start button to begin the process of writing the image file to the selected USB device.
Note: If you see a message that the image is too large, you will need to use a larger drive.
Step 12
Once recording is complete, safely remove the USB flash drive and try booting from it. If you succeed, then the recording was successful.
Creation bootable flash drive in UltraISO - the easiest way to record Windows installation. And, perhaps, the fastest. Just a couple of minutes and you’re done (provided, of course, that you have a normal PC).
Before you start, you need to install the program. You can download it from the official website (link).
How can I create a bootable USB flash drive using UltraISO?
You just need to follow the following instructions:
- Launch the program (you need to run it as an administrator).
- Next you need to open the installation image Windows file, which you want to record. To do this, select File – Open (or you can click Ctrl keys+ O).
- Specify the folder in which the Windows image is located, select it and click the “Open” button.
- If you did everything correctly, it should look like this:
- Now let's start recording. For this purpose in top menu you need to select the items: Bootstrapping – Write image of a tough disk.
- Next, select your flash drive, leave the recording method the same – USB-HDD+ and press the “Record” button. IMPORTANT! This will delete all your data on the USB flash drive. Therefore, before performing step 6, it is recommended to save all files (for example, to a computer).
- Actually, the program will warn you about this. If you have saved all the data (or you do not need it), agree and click the “Yes” button.
- The recording can last from a couple of minutes to an hour (or even more). It depends on the power of your PC or laptop.
- After the recording is completed, the program will inform you that the process has been completed successfully.
If you do not have a Windows image, but have a licensed installation DVD, then you can make a bootable USB flash drive using it
To do this, in the 3rd step you need to indicate the path to the drive where the DVD is located by selecting the items: File - Open DVD.
Creating a bootable USB flash drive from a folder with files
Finally, there is another way to create a bootable USB flash drive in UltraISO. It is suitable if a licensed digital copy is already saved in a folder on your computer.
To record setup files to a USB flash drive, you must do the following:
After some time, the bootable USB flash drive will be ready.
P.S. If for some reason creating this bootable USB flash drive in UltraISO did not work (an error appeared or something else), try repeating the procedure, carefully following the instructions. As a last resort, you can always write it with another program - fortunately there are plenty of them.
Sometimes there is a need to write an ISO image file to a USB flash drive; this is much more convenient than keeping a CD or DVD disc, since discs often fail, especially in the last couple of years, the quality of such discs leaves much to be desired.
In this article we will look at how Burn the ISO image to a USB flash drive. There are many programs for writing a file image to a USB flash drive. We will consider the simplest of them. We will record the image using the program UltraIso. In my opinion this is the simplest way. The program is paid, but you can easily find a free version on the Internet.
So we have an image file with ISO extension And installed program UltraISO.
Launch the program
In the program that opens, select the tab in the upper left corner "File"
In the window that opens, select “Open”
Select the image file that we want to write to the flash drive. For example, I took the ISO file of the recently released Windows 8.1. Double-click on it with the left mouse button
The file is open. Now in top panel select a tab
In the tab that opens, select the line "Burn hard disk image"
The recording window opens. Here we select our flash drive.
Before you burn an ISO image to a flash drive, you need to format it.
Everything is ready, the flash drive is formatted. Press the button "Record"
User's note: in general, there was an error in this review and this is what it is: in normal mode, UltraIso automatically reformats to fat32 and it doesn’t matter what the file system was before ntfs, in order to stay ntfs you need to select in ultraiso ExpressBoot, then click on ExpressWrite, as a result, when you unpack the image into a flash drive, the file system will be unchanged. You don’t need to click on the record, but a little higher.
A hint window pops up. Remember that when writing, all files on the flash drive will be erased, so if you have anything there, copy all the files to your computer in advance.
The recording process has begun.
The recording lasts approximately half an hour.
Here is our flash drive with the Windows 8.1 image ready. Now you can use it to install the new Windows 8.1 operating system on your computer.
Advantage of installing an operating room Windows systems from a flash drive is that installation time is significantly reduced compared to DVD disc. The reason for the slow installation may be either the CD or DVD ROM. So USB flash drive very good alternative.
Note! If the program is not fully functional, for example ultraiso does not offer the choice of recording to USB. Then you just need to run the program as an administrator. This is done by pressing right click mouse over the program shortcut and selecting the appropriate action!
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Greetings to all readers, and those simply looking for “users” the answer to the question: How to burn an image to a flash drive to install Windows from it? (or something else). It so happens that most users are slowly beginning to forget their purpose, and this is understandable, the cost of flash drives is rapidly falling, the writing/reading speed is increasing, and the ease of use is much higher compared to CDs!
This is an HDD - and this is how our BIOS flash drive will be determined 😉
Surely you understand that I am finishing a series of articles about for your computer and moving on to the next point - image preparation and recording it on a flash drive for further installation on a computer or laptop. Since we try to keep up with the times and want to be practical, we install the system we will use a flash drive, if you are not satisfied with this option, then I recommend reading the article on how to use NERO and .
Let's look at the pros and cons of installing an operating system from a USB drive:
1. Fast, because modern flash drives have fairly high write and read performance (V in this case the reading indicator is more critical for us), which saves time significantly! - this is of course a plus.
2. Reliable, unlike CD small scratches will not harm the information that is recorded on the drive, and the likelihood that it will fly apart in the drive is excluded 😉 What can I tell you - you yourself understand that this is a huge plus!
3. Comfortable, the sizes of such devices are very small and can easily fit into any pocket, which is also a plus, especially for those who make money by installing the OS 😉
4. Compatibility: a double-edged sword, neither a plus nor a minus! On old computers You may not be able to boot from a flash drive, and a brand new laptop may not have a CD drive or a flash drive - the only way out from the situation. (not counting the expensive USB drive)
Obvious I didn't find any cons, if this is only the fourth point, which is not a minus)! But since we collected, this is not a minus 😉
UltraISO is our assistant in burning an image to a USB drive
IN modern world It is customary to store all images in *.iso format that can be easily viewed by an archiver (for example WinRAR), however It's not enough just to unpack the contents of the image on the drive, this will not make it bootable and therefore installation from such a distribution will be impossible.
To work with ISO how we will use the program with you Ultra ISO (the program is paid, but it’s enough for us disabilities programs), well, let's get started? 😉
Official page UltraISO downloads - choose desired language and download
Open the image for further work with it
So, first we need to open the disk image that we decided to burn to USB drive. For example, I’ll write down and open the image Windows Se7en.
Selecting the image recording option
The next step is to select the menu item − “BURN HARD DISK IMAGE”
Checking the parameters UltraISO programs before recording
At this point, we check the parameters, namely, whether we will record on the right flash drive and the image itself (it is impossible to select it here; if you decide to write down another one, then return to the first point). The recording method I used USB-HDD+, check the Create Boot Partition box NOT set. Well, let’s actually press "RECORD".