Create bootable USB drive with Server 2008

20. April 2010 by Myke.

With the increase in blade systems and the decrease in optical drives on servers, it is becoming more and more of a USB drive World everyday.  I had a couple of e-mails come in asking fro help creating USB drives that are bootable with Server 2008 on them.  Easy enough, just follow the steps below and you should be golden (as long as you have at least a 4GB thumb drive).

First we need to format the thumb drive.

1. from a DOS prompt execute: diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk 1    (assuming disk 1 was your thumb drive in the above list disk command)
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. select partition 1
7. active
8. format fs=fat32
9. assign
10. exit

Now we need to get the files copied over from the DVD to the thumb drive.

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\   (assumes your DVD is drive D and your thumb drive is drive E)

Make sure the server is set to boot from USB drive and away you go.

Cheers.

Posted in Technical Questions, Microsoft, Servers | 1 Comment »