Posey's Tips & Tricks
Creating Bootable USB Installation Media for Windows Server
The process might be bumpy, as you can see in my attempt.
As someone who extensively writes about all things Windows, I find myself installing the Windows operating system quite often. Most of the time, these installations are geared toward setting up virtual machines. When I do have to set up a physical machine, I usually rely on an installation DVD. Recently however, I acquired some new servers and those machines are not equipped with optical drives. That being the case, I thought that this might be a good time to write about what is involved in preparing a USB flash drive to be used as Windows Server installation media.
In order to install Windows Server from a bootable USB flash drive, you are going to need a few things. First, you will need to have a flash drive that you can use. The flash drive must be empty (the preparation process will cause any data residing on the flash drive to be erased). The flash drive must be at least 8 GB in size, which shouldn't be a problem since nearly all flash drives being sold today are significantly larger than this.
You are also going to need an ISO file containing the Windows Server installation media. You can download the required ISO file directly from Microsoft.
In addition, you are going to need a freeware utility called Rufus. Rufus is the utility that you will be using to make your USB flash drive bootable. You can download Rufus here.
The other thing that you are going to need is a PC that is running a desktop Windows operating system. This PC will be used to prepare the USB flash drive. For the purposes of this article, I am going to be using a PC that is running Windows 11.
To get started, go ahead and install Rufus onto your Windows PC. The installation process is completely effortless. It simply involves double clicking on the Rufus executable and then telling the installer whether or not you want to allow Rufus to automatically check for updates.
Once you have Rufus up and running, insert the USB flash drive that you intend to use as installation media. When you do, you should see the Device field within the Rufus interface update to display the USB flash drive that you have just inserted. If Rufus fails to automatically detect your flash drive, you can select it from the Device drop down list.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 1. Select your USB flash drive from the Device drop down list.
The next thing that you will need to do is to choose the Disk or ISO Image option from the Boot Selection drop down list. Next, click on the Select button and then provide Rufus with the path to your Windows Server ISO file. Upon making your selection, you will need to make sure that the Image option is set to Standard Windows Installation and that the Partition Scheme is set to MBR. You will also need to set the Target System to BIOS, as shown in Figure 2.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 2.Set the Image option to Standard Windows Installation.
Normally, you won't have to worry about modifying the volume label, the file system, or the cluster size. The default values should be fine. Go ahead and click the Start button.
Upon clicking Start, you will be greeted with a prompt containing options for customizing the Windows installation, as shown in Figure 3. For example, you can disable BitLocker encryption or disable data collection. Choose your preferred customization options and click OK.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 3. Choose your preferred customization options and click OK
On my system, I received an error message at this point. The message stated that the ISO has been revoked and that using it would produce a BSOD error if Secure Boot were to be enabled. However, I was able to click OK and move forward with the deployment process. You can see the error in Figure 4.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 4. I was able to ignore this error message.
Although the process of creating a USB flash drive that can be used for installing Windows Server is relatively simple, there is one more thing that I recommend doing. It's a good idea to create a folder on your flash drive (after the drive has been prepared by Rufus) and copy any necessary device drivers to the folder. Often times, the Windows Server installer is unable to detect a server's hard drives until a storage driver has been installed. Having the storage driver accessible and ready to use can help to save a lot of time during the setup process.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.