Not too many years ago, before the USB stick came along, if you wanted to clean install your version of Windows, it had to be done using the CD or DVD and an optical drive. Thankfully time has moved on and a lot of users with sufficient knowhow can get their copy of Windows onto a pen stick and install from it. Apart from being a major benefit for netbooks and the increasing amount of users who are starting to build PC’s that no longer use ROM drives, a reasonable speed USB stick can complete the install a good bit quicker than an optical drive thanks to the much faster access times.
The good news is there are a number of programs out there that can do various things regarding creating a bootable USB Windows. Some of them will even create boot menus for you and Microsoft also has their own basic tool as well. A couple of utilities that are quite good are Rufus and UNetbootin which were mentioned in another article as well as others like Yumi or Universal USB Installer.
Another utility that can take Windows images and create a Windows bootable USB stick is WiNToBootic. This one is a bit different from some of the others in that it uses the NTFS file system and the Windows 7 boot loader, not a Linux GRUB loader. The consequence of this is that Linux ISO’s and Windows versions other than Vista, Win 7, Win 2008 and Win 8 are not supported, so no good for XP. Any utility image, recovery or repair distro that uses the Windows Preinstall Environment version 2 or 3 will work fine. ISO 9660 (Joilet) and ISO 13346 (UDF) images are supported.
WiNToBootic as you might expect, is a small and completely portable standalone executable. Simply run it and you’re ready to go.
The main focus and goal of this program is to be quick and easy to use, and as you can see from the picture, it certainly hits the mark there. Usage is really easy and the ISO is imported into the program by dragging and dropping onto the window. If your pen stick is already inserted, it will automatically be selected as the drive to write to. With more than one stick connected, find the right one with the dropdown box. Choose ‘Quick Format’ to save yourself some time, and then click ‘Do It!’.
The window will then show the process progression as a simple series of steps. If all goes well, after a short period of time, the ISO will have written successfully to the USB stick and will be ready to install from.
For DOS Prompt or batch file users, there is also the possibility to use WiNToBootic directly from the command line using the parameters show in the image below.
For more features like booting from Linux or having a multi boot pen stick, you will have to look at one of the other utilities available. But for an easy for anyone to use no frills way of getting a Windows 6.x based ISO image onto your stick, WiNToBootic is worth a look.
Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and 8 32bit and 64bit.