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Ben
Asked: 2016-09-28 11:34:04 +0800 CST

How can I create a self extracting / self burning bootable USB image?

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I need to put a bootable image of a usb stick on a website so that our users can download it and burn it to USB themselves.

They aren't especially technical, so I don't want them to have to download any other software (e.g. Rufus / MagicISO etc).

My ideal is for something like the Windows 10 Media Creator (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10).

I've seen some posts suggesting WinToFlash's Boot Replicator (https://wintoflash.com/home/en/) but the site flags up as malicious.

Is there a tool I can use that is safe and will create an exe which users can run to download and burn to a bootable USB?

OK - a bit more information to confirm this is on topic...

I am an IT professional and we have just rolled out 250 or so laptops to our offices around the world. The laptops were shipped by the manufacturer with an incorrect BIOS setting (SATA operations set to Raid rather than AHCI) which means that some recent driver updates from the manufacturer has rendered them unstable. (They are bluescreening regularly with an error with the iAstorA.sys driver.)

The fix for this is to switch them to AHCI, but this means we need to redeploy the image to our users (who may or may not be based in offices, and are spread all over the world).

Our best fix option is to get USB flash drives to them, as we have streamlined our rollout process to be basically self configuring for the users. The logistics of getting the physical USB drives around the world is a nightmare though - much better if we can provide somewhere the users (employees) can download them.

However, having to use a tool like Rufus will freak them out. I need a way that they can download a single file from the web which when run will prompt them to insert a USB stick, and then burn the bootable USB image to it.

How can I achieve this?

iso usb usb-flash-drive

1 Answers

  1. This may not be the best answer, but you could always write a script/program that does this yourself. (Which in this case would prompt a Stack Overflow question.)

    (The following would of course have to be run as an administrator because it involves disk imaging)

    For example, you might write a script or program that downloads this imaging tool or some similar program:

    https://github.com/davidferguson/CommandLineDiskImager (Just an example)

    then downloads your image,

    then asks the user to select a drive,

    then executes the imaging program with the supplied image and drive

    After confirming success, you can delete the original files you downloaded, and maybe even restart for them.

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