Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive for Installation Windows Server 2016

The easiest and the most intuitive way to create a bootable USB Flash Drive to install Windows Server 2016 on a physical server is to use Windows USB/DVD Download Tool. This tool allows to write the existing *.iso image of Windows to a USB drive or stick and make it bootable. However, it formats a drive to NTFS, which is only suitable to install Windows on BIOS systems and is not supported on systems with EFI. In this article we’ll show how to create a bootable USB Flash Drive  with Windows Server 2016 image without any third party tools.

Depending on the UEFI / BIOS server architecture, you will use one of the following methods of creating an installation USB flash drive.

UEFI Bootable USB Flash Drive

If you use a USB flash drive to boot and install Windows Server 2016 on a EFI server, there are the following requirements to the USB flash drive:

1. Minimum size of the USB stick is 8 GB
2. Partition table type is GPT
3. File system type is FAT32

So plug your USB flash drive to your computer (in our example, it is a PC running Windows 10), start the command prompt with the administrator privileges and run DISKPART with the following commands:

list disk

Display the list of the disks. In my case, the USB flash drive has the number 1. Select it:

select disk 1

Clean up its contents:

clean

Transform the partition table to GPT:

convert gpt

Create a new partition (with the size under 16GB):

create partition primary

Format this partition to FAT32:

format fs=FAT32 quick
Assign a drive letter to the new partition:

assign letter=M

Exit the diskpart:

exit

Copy the distribution files from the mounted ISO image of Windows Server 2016 to the USB flash drive (suppose that the ISO image is mounted as drive E:\).

xcopy e:\* m:\ /H /F /E

Bootable USB Flash Drive with MBR Partition Table for BIOS and UEFI Architectures

You can create a Windows Server 2016 bootable USB flash drive with the MBR partition table for both BIOS and UEFI systems. There are the following requirements to the USB flash drive:

• Minimum size of the USB flash drive is 8 GB
• Partition table type is MBR
• File system type is FAT32

Also, start a diskpart session and run these commands one by one:

The list of disks in the system:

list disk

Select your USB disk (in my example, it is Disk 1):

select disk 1

Clean it:

clean

Create a new partition. If the flash drive size is under 16 GB:

create partition primary

If it is over:

create partition primary size=16000

Format the flash drive to FAT32:

format fs=FAT32 quick

Make the partition active and assign it the drive letter M:

active
assign letter=M

Exit diskpart by running exit command and copy the distribution files to the flash drive:

xcopy e:\* m:\ /H /F /E

The Size of Install.wim is Over 4 GB

If the size of Install.wim is over 4 GB, you won’t be able to copy it to your flash drive since the maximum file size in the file system is limited to 4 GB. In this case, you will have to split the WIM file into several smaller files using DISM:

dism /Split-Image /ImageFile:e:\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:m:\sources\install.swm /FileSize:4096