Create USB Boot Media

Owned by Terrence S Miller
Last updated: Oct 12, 2022 by Liz Reagan JonesVersion comment
3 min read

Use this article to create the USB Boot Media that's required to deploy the Windows Platform as a Service OSD Task Sequence. You will need a 4 GB or larger USB thumb drive. All data on the USB thumb drive will be deleted.

There are 2 methods you can use to create Boot Media:  StickBot or the Manual method.


StickBot: Step-by-step guide

StickBot is available via the WPaaS Dropbox Boot Media Folder.

  1. Copy StickBot locally if you are retrieving it from a network location
  2. Run as Administrator, or you will get a warning
    1. You will also need PowerShell 5
    2. v5 is standard on Windows 10, and can be downloaded here otherwise:  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5039  
  3. Click “Scan for Drives” and you will be presented with ALL of the REMOVABLE DRIVES on the system
    1. You can select which ones you wish to target by checking the boxes
    2. Note that this WILL INCLUDE things like USMT drives
    3. It is HIGHLY SUGGESTED to ONLY have build media targets mounted to the system while running this tool, just to remove the chance for error
  4. NOTE: You may select the formatting for the drives.  If you select NTFS, a warning will appear letting you know that build media works best as FAT32
    1. The NTFS option is there in case of future use, or if you wish to have StickBot create USB media that aren’t MWS build media 
  5. Type “NUKE_IT_FROM_ORBIT” into the provided text box to activate the “Prepare Drives” button
  6. Click the “Prepare Drives” button
    1. You will be prompted to once again confirm your selection and move forward with formatting the selected drives
  7. Status will be displayed in the status bar at the bottom, and in the logging tab
  8. Once done, you will see a message in the status bar reflecting the complete run, and your selected drives will be named "BOOT" with the date of creation in MMDDYY format.
    1. If you want to run more than one batch of drives, repeat steps 4-6

Additional Information

  • StickBot will grab CurrentMediaLink.txt from Dropbox and compare it to LastMediaLink.txt in C:\Temp\BuildMedia (if it exists), which is created the last time you ran StickBot. This will determine whether it needs to download or update the local version of the media, and then continues with media preparation. 
  • If LastMediaLink.txt does not match CurrentMediaLink.txt, or does not exist, StickBot grabs the zip file from the link contained in CurrentMediaLink.txt into C:\Temp\BuildMedia as a scratch space. This is to prevent StickBot from downloading the same source directory every time, speeding up the process.
  • If LastMediaLink.txt exists and the folder containing the build media (C:\Temp\BuildMedia\USB) has been tampered with, corrupted, or deleted, StickBot will not know this and will create build sticks that won't work. In this case, click the Clear Local Media button to start over.
  • All selected drives will be wiped, partitioned, formatted, and have the contents from the local instance of the download media (C:\Temp\BuildMedia\USB) copied to them  Progress will be shown both in the status bar at the bottom, as well as a full log in the “Logging” tab.
  • If for some reason StickBot doesn’t want to download media or the media txt file, please alert MWS Windows Engineering so they can diagnose the cause of the issue.

Manual Process to create a Boot Stick: Step-by-step guide

  1. Copy the USB Boot media files (USB.zip) from the WPaaS Dropbox Folder to a computer running Windows 10.
  2. Extract the boot media file.
  3. Insert the USB thumb drive to a USB port on the Windows 10 computer.
  4. Open a command prompt as administrator on the Windows 10 computer, and type the command DISKPART.EXE to start the DiskPart command-line interface.
  5. At the DISKPART prompt type LIST DISK to determine the disk associated with the USB thumb drive.
  6. In the example steps below, my internal hard drive is Disk 0 and USB thumb drive is Disk 1. Run these commands at the DISKPART prompt to prepare Disk 1 to be a bootable drive:
    1. SELECT DISK 1
    2. CLEAN
    3. CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
    4. SELECT PARTITION 1
    5. ACTIVE
    6. FORMAT FS=FAT32 QUICK
    7. ASSIGN
    8. EXIT
  7. Copy the files extracted in Step 2 to the USB thumb drive.