220-802 · Question #922
A technician wants to test out Windows 7 before deploying it on a workstation. Which of the following must be completed FIRST in order to run Windows 7 from a bootable USB drive?
The correct answer is C. Create a primary partition and make it active. Before a USB drive can be used as a boot device, it must have a primary partition that is set as active so the BIOS/firmware can identify it as bootable.
Question
A technician wants to test out Windows 7 before deploying it on a workstation. Which of the following must be completed FIRST in order to run Windows 7 from a bootable USB drive?
Options
- AFormat the USB drive to FAT16 file format
- BCopy over the boot.ini file
- CCreate a primary partition and make it active
- DCopy over the config.sys file
How the community answered
(24 responses)- A8% (2)
- B4% (1)
- C71% (17)
- D17% (4)
Why each option
Before a USB drive can be used as a boot device, it must have a primary partition that is set as active so the BIOS/firmware can identify it as bootable.
FAT16 has a maximum partition size of 2 GB and cannot support the Windows 7 installation files; the USB drive should be formatted as FAT32 or NTFS for Windows 7 bootable media.
boot.ini was used by Windows XP and earlier to configure the boot menu - Windows 7 uses the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store instead, making boot.ini irrelevant.
A bootable USB drive requires a primary partition marked as active (using tools like diskpart) so that the system BIOS or UEFI firmware recognizes it as a valid boot device and loads the boot sector. Without an active primary partition, the firmware will not attempt to boot from the USB drive regardless of what files are present on it.
config.sys is a DOS and Windows 9x era configuration file that has no role in Windows 7 boot process and is not required on bootable Windows 7 media.
Concept tested: Creating a bootable USB drive with active partition
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/diskpart
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