Forum Discussion
How do I burn an ISO image to USB and make it bootable?
I needed to burn ISO to USB to install Windows 11 and decided to try to do it manually using the diskpart command line tool. It was a real pain in the **bleep** but I also learned a lot.
First of all, it takes a bit of guts to open the command prompt to do this because you can easily erase the wrong drive. I remember being very careful at first and following the instructions online: list all disks, then select my USB drive, erase all data, create a new partition, format it, and finally activate the partition to make it bootable.
The next step was to extract the ISO file to the USB, which was a relatively simple step of dragging the file over. But I later discovered that simply copying the file was not enough because the necessary boot code was not written to the boot portion of the USB.
Although it worked in the end and the computer booted from the USB to the installation interface, I feel that if you don't really need to understand the low-level operation, it is more worry-free and labor-saving to use those one-click bootable creation tools.