An ISO file is a sector-by-sector disk image of a CD or DVD disk. An ISO image can be easily mounted to a USB drive by simply extracting its content to USB Flash disk. However, mounting a bootable CD or DVD disk’s ISO image on a USB flash disk is slightly tricky. Mounting an ISO image to USB drive can be useful in installing Windows 7 on a PC that does not have a DVD-ROM drive.

1. Download MagicDisk (an optical disk drive emulator) and Install it following onscreen instructions. (Please refer to MagicDisk product documentation for details)

2. Download MBRWizard command line tool and extract to x:\Win-7-Prep folder. (Replace x: with your drive letter.)

3. Format the connected USB Flash Drive by “format x:” command on the Command Prompt. (The ‘x:’ in the command should be replaced with drive letter of USB Flash Drive.)

4. Convert the formatted USB disk’s file system to NTFS by “convert x: /FS:NTFS” command on the Command Prompt. (The ‘x:’ in the command should be replaced with drive letter of USB Flash Drive.)

5. Mount Windows 7 ISO image as drive using Freeware MagicDisc.

6. Discover the disk number for your USB Flash Drive using “mbrwiz /list”

7. Enable booting from the USB disk partition using “mbrwiz /disk=x /part=y /active” (letter x is the disk # and letter y is the partition #)

8. Now change drive to X:\ (x: is the drive letter of Windows 7 iso mounted using MagicDisk)

9. Change directory to boot using ‘CD Boot’ on command prompt

10. Update boot record on USB drive using “bootsect /nt60 x:” (letter x is drive letter of your USB drive)

11. Copy all files from mount Windows 7 iso image to USB.

12. Reboot your computer and press appropriate key (F2/F9/F10/DEL key as applicable) to enter your BIOS settings and select USB drive as your first boot drive.

13. Save the BIOS settings and quit out of BIOS screen and continue.

Congrats, you have successfully mounted the ISO image to your drive.