ISO burn bootable disc. OS boot disk

To install Windows, you need a boot disk or bootable USB flash drive. In this article, I will talk about the simplest and most reliable ways to create bootable media that works with any version of Windows (XP, 7, 8, 10).

If you are reinstalling Windows on an old computer, I recommend running. Prepare in advance.

If you purchased Windows on a DVD and your computer or laptop has a DVD drive, then you do not need this article, go to the next article “”.

2. Selecting boot media

If you have a Windows installation disk, but your computer or laptop does not have a DVD drive, then you will need a computer with a DVD drive to create a bootable USB flash drive from the installation disk. Go to the "" section.
Sandisk Cruzer

If you received Windows as an image file, you need to create a boot disk or flash drive. If your computer or laptop has a DVD drive, it is easier and more reliable to use a DVD. Prepare 2-3 blank DVD-R 16x discs and proceed to the "" section.

If your computer or laptop does not have a DVD drive or you are too lazy to go to the store to buy discs, then take a flash drive with a capacity of 4 GB or more and go to the “” section.

3. Create a disk image

We use the Daemon Tools program to create an image file from the Windows installation disk, which will later be needed to create a bootable USB flash drive. You can download it at the end of the article in the “” section.

3.1. Installing Daemon Tools

3.2. Creating an image in Daemon Tools

Insert the Windows installation disc into your DVD drive and close the AutoPlay window if it appears. Find the “DAEMON Tools Lite” shortcut on your desktop or START menu and launch the program. Click on the floppy disk icon “Create a disk image.”

Make sure that the drive you inserted the Windows installation disc into is selected. The drive letter in Windows Explorer and in the program window must match.

Uncheck the “Add to Image Catalog” option and click on the button with three dots “…” to select a folder to save the image file. Please note that it can take up to 3.5 GB.

I recommend saving the image file on a separate disk partition (for example, “D”). In the “File name” column, enter, for example, “Windows_7” so that you can later understand what kind of file it is. I recommend not using Russian letters and spaces in the title. In the “File type” column, be sure to select “Standard ISO images (*.iso)” and click “Save”.

Check that everything is correct and click “Start”.

The image creation process takes only 3-5 minutes. At the end the message “Image creation completed” should appear. Click the “Close” button and exit the main program by clicking on the cross.

If an error message appears or the process is stuck in place, then either the installation disc or the DVD drive is damaged. Try wiping the disk with a dry, soft cloth and try again, or use a different computer.

4. Create a boot disk

We need the Astroburn program to burn an image file to a DVD. You can download it below in the “” section. If you plan to use a USB flash drive to install Windows, skip this section.

4.1. Installing Astroburn

Installing the program is quite simple. Run the installation file and click Next several times.

4.2. Burning a disc in Astroburn

Insert a blank disc into your DVD drive and close the AutoPlay window if it appears. Find the Astroburn Lite shortcut on your desktop or START menu and launch the program. Switch to the “Image” tab and click on the icon to the right of the “Path to image file” field.

Find where the Windows image file is located on your disk, select it with the left mouse button and click “Open”. For example, all my disk images are located on drive “D” in the “ISO” folder.

Double-check that you have selected the correct file and that the “Check” checkbox next to the DVD drive name is selected. This will ensure that the disc was recorded without errors and that the Windows installation process will not be interrupted unexpectedly. I also recommend setting the recording speed to 8.0x, this is optimal for 16x DVD-R discs. Click "Start Recording".

The process of burning a disc along with checking takes up to 10 minutes. When you finish recording, close the program. If an error message appears or the process is frozen, it means either you got a bad disk or the DVD drive is worn out.

Try recording again on a new disc, if it doesn’t work, then use another computer.

5. Creating a bootable USB flash drive

5.1. Methods for creating bootable flash drives

There are many ways and programs for creating bootable flash drives, from manually writing commands on the command line to using Linux boot loaders. The disadvantage of the command line is that it is difficult for beginners and prone to errors. The disadvantage of Linux bootloaders is that such flash drives do not boot on all computers.

There is also an official program from Microsoft for creating bootable flash drives “Windows USB/DVD Download Tool”. It is very easy to use and flash drives recorded with it can be loaded on most computers. But this program has a number of limitations. For example, to use it in Windows XP, you need to additionally install several more cumbersome add-ons (.NET Framework 2.0 and Image Mastering API v2), and in order to create a bootable USB flash drive for installing Windows 7 x64 in Windows 7 x32, you need to copy it to the folder with the program additional file or fiddling with the command line. There are other problems with the program.

Therefore, I decided to give you just one, but simple and reliable way to create bootable flash drives that are suitable for any operating systems and computers, using the Rufus program.

5.2. Using Rufus

The Rufus program is designed to create bootable flash drives for installing various operating systems, including Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10. It does not require installation and can be run on any operating system from Windows XP to Windows 10, regardless of bitness .

You can download this program in the "" section. Next, you will need any computer with Windows installed and a flash drive with a capacity of at least 4 GB.
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Insert the flash drive into your computer and if there are valuable files on it, copy them to your hard drive. Immediately after creating a bootable USB flash drive or when you have finished installing Windows, you can return them back.

It is not necessary to clean and format the flash drive, just run the Rufus program and make sure that the flash drive is selected in the “Device” field.

Find where the Windows image file is located on your disk, select it with the left mouse button and click “Open”. For example, my previously created image is located on drive “D”.

Now you need to select the type of boot partition (MBR or GPT) and computer motherboard firmware (BIOS or UEFI) on which Windows will be installed. It's not as difficult as it sounds

MBR is a simpler and more reliable type of boot partition, but does not support hard drives larger than 2 TB. If you don't have a 3TB or larger drive, I recommend using this partition type to avoid some possible problems in the future.

GPT is a more advanced type of boot partition that supports very large disks. If you have a hard drive with a capacity of 3 TB or more, then use this type of partition, otherwise the computer will only see about 2.3 TB. In other cases, I do not recommend GPT markup, as there are various problems with it.

The motherboard firmware can be BIOS or UEFI. This can be found in the manual or on the website of the motherboard or laptop manufacturer, as well as visually when entering the Setup boot program. To do this, you need to hold down the “Delete”, “F2”, “F10” or “Esc” button immediately after turning on the computer. You can read which button to press in the messages that appear immediately after turning on the computer.

In text form.

In graphical form.

If the Setup program looks like the picture below, then this is a classic BIOS.

If it’s like in the next picture, then it’s UEFI.

So, if you have a classic BIOS, then select “MBR for computers with BIOS or UEFI” in the “Partition scheme and system interface type” field. This is the most universal option and the flash drive can be used for installation on different computers, both with BIOS and UEFI.

If you have determined for sure that you have UEFI and the disk size does not exceed 2 TB, then select “MBR for computers with a UEFI interface.” If you have UEFI and a disk of 3 TB or more, then select “GPT for computers with a UEFI interface.”

Next you need to select “File system”. If in the previous step you selected “MBR for computers with BIOS or UEFI,” then select NTFS. If the second or third item is with UEFI, then select FAT32, since UEFI does not work with NTFS.

We leave the cluster size at default, and in the “Volume Label” field you can write, for example, “Windows7 x32” (or x64) so that you can later determine what’s on this flash drive.

Double-check all settings and the correct image selection. The selected disk image is displayed at the very bottom of the program. Instead of the name of the flash drive, it may be written “CD_ROM”; the drive letter must match the flash drive.

Click on the “Start” button and confirm the destruction of your flash drive along with your computer

Wait for the recording to finish, this can take from 3 to 20 minutes depending on the size of the image and the speed of the flash drive and should end with the green bar completely filling and the word “Ready” at the bottom of the program.

After that, you can add any files to the bootable flash drive and use it like a regular flash drive. If it is working properly, this will not affect its operation as an installation disk. But perform a safe removal of the flash drive using the system tray icon.

5.3. Possible problems and solutions

Problems can arise due to a bad flash drive, a bad USB extension cable, a damaged or incompletely downloaded image file from the Internet, or the computer itself on which the recording takes place.

Possible solutions:

formatting and checking the flash drive for bad blocks
(there is a checkmark in the Rufus program)
inserting a flash drive into the rear USB port of the computer
Windows image checksum verification
(for example, the Hash Calculator program)
burning a flash drive on another computer
replacing a flash drive with another one

As for checking the checksum of an image, usually the site where you download the image has its checksum (or hash). The checksum also needs to be calculated for the downloaded file using a special Hash Calculator program, which you can download below in the “” section. If the calculated checksum matches the one indicated on the website, then the file was downloaded without damage. If the hashes do not match, then the file is damaged and must be downloaded again. Otherwise, errors may occur during the disc burning or Windows installation process.

6. Links

That's all, in the next article we will talk about booting from an installation disk or flash drive.

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Sandisk Cruzer

Before you can start working with your computer, you need to install an operating system on it. In this case, there is no way to do without an installation device. It will also help you start your PC in case of a critical error. One option for such a device could be a DVD disc. Let's figure out how to create an installation or boot disk with Windows 7.

Special programs that are designed to create images can burn the operating system distribution or its backup copy to disk. These are the ones that will be discussed further in the description of specific ways to implement the task. But before you start working with these programs, you need to create a backup copy of the system or download the Windows 7 distribution, depending on what you need a boot disk for: to install the system from scratch or to restore it in case of a crash. You must also insert a blank DVD into the drive.

Method 1: UltraISO

UltraISO is rightfully considered the most popular program for creating bootable drives. We will talk about it first of all.

Method 2: ImgBurn

The next program that will help in solving this problem is ImgBurn. This product is not as popular as UltraISO, but its undoubted advantage is that it is completely free.

As you can see, making a Windows 7 installation disk is quite simple if you have a system image and a specialized program for processing it appropriately. As a rule, the difference between these applications is minimal, and therefore the choice of specific software for this purpose is not of fundamental importance.

You can download the Windows 7 disk boot image - installation torrent on your computer for free and without registration from our website. Here everyone will find a Windows 7 SP1 installation disk in Russian for any purpose and configuration of your computer or laptop. A Windows 7 disk image is usually in ISO format, so you can create a bootable Windows 7 disk for further installation of Windows 7 using any program that works with images, we recommend the Rufus program or the UltraISO program.

Before you download a windows7 system disk from microsoft, you need to decide on your goals and capabilities. This directly affects the choice when downloading a distribution kit for Windows 7.
If your goal is to play games, go to websites and social networks, listen to music and watch movies, to work at home for entertainment purposes and to get acquainted with this OS, and you don’t really want to delve into how to activate Windows for free later 7, and how to correctly install the necessary drivers on your Windows 7. In addition, you want there to be nothing superfluous and full functionality, we recommend downloading the original Windows 7 maximum disk image with an activator and driver installer built into the desktop, from the link below . For optimal system operation on your PC, if you have 4 GB or more RAM, download a 64bit Windows 7 disk; if you have 1GB - 3GB, download a 32bit version of the Windows 7 disk.

Download disk windows 7 x64 maximum ISO image torrent

Download disk windows 7 32bit maximum ISO image torrent

If you still need to install win7, for home and entertainment purposes with free activation, and you want to have a full set of versions of the Windows 7 line on one disk or one flash drive with the possibility of installation with the Office 2016 package already installed, programs, updates, with installed gaming system utilities. We recommend downloading this assembly of Windows 7 sp1 x86 x64 13in1 disks. It already has security updates 07/17/2017, in addition, it has the ability to select two interface languages, Russian and English.

In case you need the win 7 operating system to work in an enterprise, to keep records of a legal business, to work with money and increased security, or for other commercial purposes, we recommend purchasing a license key for windows 7 on the official website of Microsoft developers and downloading only a clean one official, original windows7 image to avoid fines and sanctions from Microsoft.

For security reasons, we recommend installing drivers only downloaded from the official website of the manufacturers of the motherboard, video card, etc. of your laptop or computer. We also recommend downloading all programs only from the official developer sites. If you have something to risk, information, files, accounts, etc., then there is no such thing as too much vigilance.
Attention! In some assemblies, the default settings for the Chrome browser are already set; the start page leads to the go.mail.ru search engine. Everyone has the opportunity to change the search engine to any other.

The Windows 7 installation (boot) disk is a DVD media containing boot files that are used to initially install Windows, or to reinstall it. You should not think that it can be done by simply copying files; it is not by chance that it is called bootable, since in addition to OS files it also contains a bootloader, thanks to which you can start installing Windows through the BIOS.

There are several different options for creating such a disk using both built-in tools in Windows itself and using third-party programs. Let's look at the three simplest methods using the UltraISO, ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP utilities. Any of them can be easily downloaded on the Internet (especially from torrents); they all have a very simple interface that does not require any complex manipulations from the user. To create an installation disk, they all require a Windows 7 image in .iso format on the hard drive (or other media). You will also need a DVD disc (not a CD), since the “seven” image is, as a rule, about 3-4 GB in size.

Method 1 - creating a disc using the UltraISO utility

After launching it, the main menu of the program opens. In this menu you need to select the “File” item, and in the drop-down list select the “Open” item:

A window will appear to select a file with a Windows iso image:

In this window, select the file with the required image and click the “Open” button. This window will close and we will return to the UltraISO main menu.

Now you need to click on the “Tools” item in the main menu and select “ ”:

After this it will appear with recording parameters:

Here you need to specify the DVD device in which the (blank) future installation disc is located (the “Drive” parameter), set the recording speed to “Minimum” and its method “Disc-at-Once”. Then click the “Record” button. The burning process will begin, which usually lasts a few minutes, after which the DVD drive tray will open, indicating the end of recording.

Method 2 – make an installation disk using the ImgBurn utility

Before starting the program, you should install a blank DVD disc into the drive. The main window of this program (Russified version) after its launch looks like this:

In this window, click on the “ ” picture and get a window for setting parameters for the disk creation process:

In this window you need to do the following:

In the “Source” field, use the yellow button to select the required iso file;
In the “Destination” field, set the DVD drive;
Check the “Check” checkbox so that at the end of the process a comparison with its source is performed;
In the “Recording speed” field, set the minimum possible speed;
Click on the arrow at the bottom left of the window, indicating the start of the DVD burning process.

The image recording begins, which also lasts several minutes, then the program will automatically eject the media tray and push it in again. After which the verification of the recorded data will begin. Upon completion, the melody is played, which is a sign of the completion of the process.

Method 3 – make an installation disk using the CDBurnerXP program

You should not be alarmed by the fact that the name of this utility contains “XP” - it works in all versions of the OS, starting with XP. The interface of this program is almost very similar to the ImgBurn interface. And the main CDBurnerXP window looks like this:

Of course, in order to make an installation disk, you need to click on “Burn ISO image” and click “OK”. After this, you will be prompted to set recording parameters:

In this window, use the “Browse” button to select the Windows iso image, set the DVD drive and minimum recording speed (the “Recording device” parameter), select “Disc at Once” in the “Recording method” field, and check the “Check” box. data after recording." The user must set the remaining parameters at his own discretion.

After all these steps, you need to click the “Burn disc” button, the process of burning the DVD disc and then checking the completed recording will begin.

The requirement to set a minimum burning speed is due to the fact that not all DVDs support the speed declared by the manufacturer. This means that errors may appear during the recording process, which will only be detected at the verification stage. If you use media that allows write-once (DVD-R), then the final result of this process may be a disc completely unsuitable for further use;
Under no circumstances should you interrupt the recording process - most likely, this will lead to the same result as described in point 1;
These recommendations are not related to the use of the utilities mentioned above; recording errors depend 99% on the quality of the working surface of the disks, i.e., on their manufacturers.

Most users can already install the operating system themselves. After all, you don’t need to have a lot of knowledge here, the main thing is to have a head and strictly follow the instructions. Installation is usually done from a disk or using a bootable USB flash drive.

But today we will learn about another, original way to install an operating system. If you think about it this way, then any removable media of suitable volume may be suitable for these purposes. So why not try it out for this? Sometimes this can really come in handy when there is no optical drive or suitable flash drive.

There are many applications on the Internet that can make a boot hdd. But then it turned out that make the HDD bootable using standard Windows tools, without installing anything on your computer. Now we will see how this is done.

Preparing the hard drive

The very first step in such cases is to make sure that there is no important information on the disk. Copy all its contents to another location and save it so you don’t regret what you lost later. We will configure the hard drive on the Windows 8.1 operating system. But if you use older versions of this OS, then it’s okay - the difference is not big and everything is done in approximately the same way. An interesting feature is that the bootable hard drive can simultaneously have Windows and separate files for other needs. This is achieved by creating several partitions on it.

1. Connect an external drive to your PC and open Disk Management

All information on the hard drive will be lost!

Right-click on the Start menu and select Disk Management.

On older versions of Windows, you need to go to Computer Management. To do this, open the “Control Panel” through the “Start” menu. Next, open the “Administration” section and expand “Computer Management”. After this, you will need to expand the “Storage Devices” tab. On it open “Disk Management”.

2. Select an external drive

4. Partition the disk

Now we do the opposite - we create partitions. We will need to create one partition directly for the installation OS, and the second will be for other needs. Right-click on the unallocated field for this disk and in the context menu that opens, click on Create a simple volume.

5. Create a new volume

A special wizard will immediately appear to create simple volumes. Specify the volume for this volume as 4404 megabytes. Click Next.

Do the same with the remaining partition on the disk. In this case, it will not need to be made active.

Recording Windows to an external HDD

There is nothing complicated at all, everything is done as simple as shelling pears. If you have a bootable DVD, then simply open it using Explorer, then select all the files and folders that are on it and copy it to the active volume on the external hard drive.

If you have an ISO disk image with a distribution of the operating system, then you can open it with any archiver. After all, such an image is a kind of archive. On the “eight” it can even be opened by a conductor. After opening, copy all files and folders to the external HDD in the same way. After this simple procedure, the USB HDD will work like a regular bootable flash drive. All that remains is, after connecting the drive, to make the necessary settings in the BIOS. Go to BIOS settings. This is done differently on different computers, usually using the Del key, or the F2 button (on laptops). In the settings, open the “Boot” section. Next, in the Boot Priority order parameters, put USB HDD first in the list. To save the settings, click on F10 and the OK button. After this, the computer will restart and the installation of Windows (or any other OS) will be loaded from the external hard drive

If you can't make the partition active

For unknown reasons, this topic is not found anywhere on the Internet. Even though many users encounter it. But it happens that no partitions on the disks want to be made active, this button simply is not pressed. For those who do not yet fully understand the difference between active and inactive, let me explain: the computer boots the operating system only from active partitions.

A section is made active using one of two main methods:

Through disk management. This is the method that we have already discussed above. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes you just can't make a volume active.
Via the command line using diskpart. Here everything is a little more complicated, but you can resort to this method when the first one does not work. Now we will study it in detail.

How to make a volume active using the command line?

Connect your external drive, which is already partitioned. Through the Start menu, on the All Programs tab, open the default folder and select Command Prompt. It needs to be run with administrator rights. If anyone doesn’t know, then you need to right-click and select the appropriate item in the context menu. Also using the key combination WIN+X.

Once the terminal window appears, enter the following command: diskpart. Then click on "Enter". The line DISKPART> should appear.

Now you need to enter the command list disk and confirm again by pressing the “Enter” button. The window will display a sign with all the hard drives that are currently connected to the computer.

You need to select the one that is used as boot. This is done using the command select disk 0. Moreover, “0” is the number for the disk we need. Since we partitioned disk number “1”, the command, in our case, will look like this: select disk 1. This will select drive number one.

Now we will search for the partitions that are on this disk. We need to get a list of them. Therefore, we enter the command list partition and press the Enter button.

Now, we will need to select the section that we will make active. Enter this command: select partition 1. After that, press the Enter button. As with disks, one is the partition number. After this, a confirmation message will appear indicating that the desired section has been selected.

After the previous step, enter the following command active and press the “Enter” key. A message should then appear stating that the current partition is marked as active.