How to create UEFI bootable flash drive

New computers are supplied exclusively with UEFI. In the following article, I will describe how to create a UEFI bootable flash drive to install the operating system. The described procedure applies to both Windows 7 and Windows 8 (and newer) devices.

For installation you will need at least 4 GB flash drive and 64bit installation image or DVD with Windows 7 or Windows 8 (or newer).

1. Connect the USB flash drive to the computer on which you will prepare the drive.
2. Open command line with elevated rights (Run as administrator on the cmd.exe).
3. At the prompt, type the following commands (replace # by disk number):
   
   MS DOS

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   diskpart list disk select disk # clean create partition primary format fs=fat32 quick active assign

4. Close the command line window.
5. Open the disk image. In Windows 8, just double-click the image (ISO file) – the image will be connected as another drive in Explorer. In Windows 7, use for example 7-Zip and extract the image to folder.
6. Select all the files on the disk (CTRL + A), right click and select Send to – Removable Disk (your flash disk).
7. Copy the efi\microsoft\boot to EFI location. In the folder EFI will be now folders microsoft and boot.
8. On the installation image, go to the folder sources and using 7-Zip copy the file sources\install.wim\1\Windows\Boot\EFI\bootmgfw.efi to the location efi\boot on the installation USB drive. Rename the file to bootx64.efi. This step is not needed when you are creating installation drive with Windows 8 or newer.

UEFI installation flash disk is now ready.