This second way to install Windows 8 from a USB Flash Drive is a little bit more advanced, but we are going to walk you through step by step. The first thing you are going to want to do is take your flash drive and plug it into your system. Then open up command prompt (make sure you run it as administrator) and type in diskpart. Once diskpart opens up type in the command list disk.
This will list all of your connected drives. Identify your flash drive, which in our case is “Disk 6”. Select your disk by typing the command select disk then your disk number so in our case we would type select disk 6. From there type the following commands.
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs
assign
exit
What we have done there was clean the drive, create a primary partition make it active then format it to the NTFS file system and assign it a drive letter. Once you type the assign command your drive should pop up. Make sure you take note of this drive letter.
Next we want to make the USB flash drive bootable. This is easy done, but first you are going to need to mount your downloaded Windows 8 ISO. I simple tool to do this is Daemon Tools. Once you have mounted the ISO take note of its drive letter. Now again open command prompt with administrator privileges. Within command prompt navigate to your mounted drive, our drive letter is M so I simply typed in M:. Next navigate to the boot directory by typing the command cd boot. Finally run this command, where “K” is the drive letter of our flash drive:
bootsect /nt60 K:
Once you have run the command you will get a prompt saying it was successful.
Finally it is time to copy all of your files over to the flash drive. This can be done in two different ways either with xcopy or robocopy, both of which are available in Windows 7. So again open up command prompt and run either of these 2 commands:
Note: “M” is our mounted ISO drive and “K” is our flash drive.
xcopy M:\*.* K: /E /F /H
robocopy M:\ K:\ /mir
Remember to only run one of these commands. If you have run the command successfully you will see all of the files being copied to your flash drive within the command prompt window. Once it has completed you are ready to install Windows 8 on your system.
When you boot up the system you will be installing Windows 8 on you will need to go into the BIOS or Boot Menu to select your flash drive as the default boot device. This is normally done by pressing the “Del” key on your keyboard to enter the BIOS and either “F2” or “F12” to enter the boot menu. Now select your flash drive and the Windows 8 install should start.
If you are having issues installing Windows 8 using either of the 2 methods discussed in the article let us know in the comments and we will help you out!
