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MeganHarris's avatar
MeganHarris
Copper Contributor
Jul 11, 2024

How do I burn an ISO image to USB and make it bootable?

I recently tried to make a bootable USB, but ran into some problems. I had an ISO file and originally wanted to directly copy ISO to USB drive, but then I found that the USB would not be bootable on ...
Mark10n's avatar
Mark10n
Copper Contributor
Aug 03, 2025

I was installing Win2012Server on my lab PC last week having an ISO image (less than 4GB). Prepared Bootable USB on a Win10 machine in a few simple steps using File Explorer's and Disk Manager's GUI (no IT admin skills required):

  1. Formatted an USB drive in FAT32 (faithful 32GB drive that I was already using for Win10 installations),
  2. Set/ensured that the USB drive partition is a single, Active, and Primary partition in the Disk Manager ( Win+X -> K )
  3. Mounted the ISO file as a virtual DVD Drive (double clicked it),
  4. Copied all the content of the mounted virtual DVD Drive (from its root folder) to the formatted USB drive.

Booted and installed the OS on Intel NUC 5i5XXXX without issues.

HTH

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