LAPTOPS

How To Format Your PC Using a USB Pen drive

By Romdani | Jan 6, 2015

Today, as laptops are becoming lighter and lighter, smaller and smaller, and peripherals, like the optical or CD/DVD drive are being left off the machine.

Also tablets, ultrabooks, and netbooks are too small to have one, and most users balk at the idea of lugging an external drive and cabling along. So what happens if there’s a disaster and your laptop, tablet, Ultrabook, or netbook has to be reformatted?

You have two choices: take it to a repair shop or get a pen drive, and use it to reformat your system. Also known as flash or thumb drives, pen drives range from 1 inch to 2 inches long, and are typically the width of the USB connector on the end that is plugged into your machine. They are available in capacities from 1 GB to 500 GB, and can be connected to a keychain, slipped into your purse or pocket, or even hung from a neck chain, which is what a friend of mine does.

To use it to reformat your PC, laptop, or tablet, it’s got to be formatted as a system boot disk first. That can be done several ways, which will be outlined below. First things first: before formatting the pen drive, make sure you have purchased one large enough to hold your windows installation file. They are inexpensive: I purchased two 32 GB SanDisk Cruzer pen drives for $35 during a sale, recently. That’s nearly 6 times as much space as you would need to copy over a full Windows 7 or Windows 8 Professional Installation.

Option I

1. Assuming you have the right sized pen drive, let’s begin. If you have a Windows 7 or 8 DVD, then you will need to create an ISO file. If you already have an ISO file, skip steps 1 and 2. Download some burner software and install it. You will be looking for something like ‘BurnAware Free’ (burnaware.com), ‘ISO Image Burner’ (isoimageburner.com), or Active@ISO burner from cnet.com. Pick one and make sure you deselect the check boxes for any offers to install extra free software.

2. Insert the DVD in the optical drive, run the burner software, and select “Burn to Image”. Select the files on the DVD drive, and with asked, save it to desktop and execute.

3. Navigate to this page at Microsoft.com and download the USB/DVD download tool (www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-download-tool).

4. Follow the instructions on that page to create a bootable pen drive using the ISO file. The USB/DVD tool formats a bootable pen drive for you without you having to do any extra work.

5. Restart the computer with the USB drive connected, restart, hit the “ESC” key immediately to bring up the menu, and select the USB drive as the boot drive. Proceed to reinstall windows.

Option II

You are going to format the pen drive manually. It’s a little more in-depth with the steps it takes, but it’s still within your capabilities to do this.

1. From the start menu, right-click on ACCESSORIES>CMD and select “run as administrator” from the dropdown menu. In windows 8, you can just select the administrator level of CMD.
2. When it’s open, type in ‘DiskPart’ and wait for the command prompt to return. It could take a minute to do that.
3. Connect the Pen drive to your computer.
4. As soon as you get the prompt, type in ‘List Disk’. Note down the number associated with the pen drive. Let’s assume it’s “2”.
5. Type ‘Select DISK 2’.
6. Type ‘CLEAN’. If the prompt indicates that the command completed successfully, proceed to step 7.
7. Type ‘SELECT DISK 2’
8. Type ‘CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY’
9. Type ‘SELECT PARTITION 1’
10. Type ‘ACTIVE’
11. Type ‘FORMAT FS=NTFS’ and wait for it to complete
12. Type ‘ASSIGN’
13. Type ‘EXIT’. You should get a prompt indicating DiskPart has closed.
14. If you have the DVD, then put it in the optical drive, if you have an ISO file, download and install Power ISO or any other virtual disk drive software. Run it, and Load the ISO file. Note the virtual drive letter.
15. Type ‘D: CD BOOT’ where “D” is the actual drive letter assigned to your DVD drive or the letter assigned to your virtual drive.
16. Type CD BOOT
17. Type BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 E:, where “E” is actually the letter assigned to the pen drive.
18. Exit the CMD prompt (type in exit and hit enter).
19. Copy all the files on the DVD drive or the virtual drive to the USB drive, then reboot the computer.
20. Immediately, hit the “ESC” key to bring up the menu so you can select the USB drive as the boot drive and follow the prompts.

That’s it, you’re done! You should have formatted your PC with the use of your pen drive. That wasn’t as bad as you thought it might be, was it?!

REFENCES-http://thefusejoplin.com/2015/01/format-pc-usb-pen-drive/