How to Create Bootable USB Disk for Installing Windows 10

Microsoft has skipped one whole version (version 9) after Windows 8 and has introduced Windows 10 a few days ago. As usual the new version of Windows operating system is also available in form of a downloadable ISO image that you can burn on a blank DVD media. But not everyone has a spare blank DVD lying around if they want to install Windows 10 as soon as the download of the ISO is complete. In situations like this, you can choose to create a bootable USB disk instead of a bootable DVD. Even if you have a Windows 10 DVD, you may still want to create a bootable USB disk because the USB drives tend to be a tad faster than the DVD media.

This is how you can create a bootable USB disk for Windows 10 easily:

  1. If you have downloaded the DVD ISO image from the internet, then you can skip this step. But if you have a Windows 10 DVD, then you have to convert it to an ISO image using the ISO Workshop.
  2. Download Rufus tool which is a portable program to create bootable USB disks of various types.
  3. Insert a USB disk of 8 GB capacity into a USB port in your PC. This disk shall be formatted and everything would be erased from it, so be careful to make a backup of all the contents it carries before proceeding.
  4. Run the Rufus tool. Select the target USB disk from drop-down menu, select MBR partition scheme for BIOS and UEFI computers and select NTFS as file system.Windows 10 Bootable USB Disk
  5. Under the format options, choose Quick format. Then choose Create bootable disk using ISO image and select the Windows 10 ISO image (that you downloaded from the internet or created in step 1) by clicking on the small disk icon.
  6. You can click on the Start button to initiate the creation of the bootable Windows 10 USB disk. This will take approximately 15 minutes for the whole process to finish. The Rufus status window will display “DONE” when the process has completed.
  7. Now that you have Windows 10 bootable USB disk ready for use, you can use it to install on your PC by booting your PC off this USB disk.

Conclusion: It is very easy to create a bootable Windows 10 USB disk for installing Windows 10 on your computers. The USB disks are faster compared to the DVD disks and can be utilized over and over again for other uses as well.

You can download the Rufus utility from http://rufus.akeo.ie/.

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