RMPrepUSB

It's much easier to install an operating system from a USB flash drive than it is from a CD or DVD. However, no one is distributing operating systems on flash drives yet, so you have to make your own bootable media if you want to install Windows in just a few minutes. While there are plenty of applications out there that create bootable drives, RMPrepUSB is something worth considering, especially by power users. This piece of software places many more options at your disposal than most other similar applications. It supports more operations and operating systems, and it opens up many interesting possibilities, from creating an installation drive to creating several pre-boot environments (PE) on the same drive to prepare yourself for the day your operating system stops working.

RMPrepUSB comes in a small package, and you can install it on your computer in just a few seconds. There are no complex settings to be made along the way, and you don't have to install any special tools or drivers to run the application. Furthermore, it's compatible with all popular Windows versions, and it doesn't use a significant amount of memory or processing power.

There's a lot you can do with RMPrepUSB, and most of it can be done on the same user interface, without bringing up additional windows. While this makes the interface looks a bit crowded, the options are laid out in a logical manner, and they are even grouped and numbered so that you can take everything step by step. Once you've selected a drive and specified its size and volume label, you can pick between several bootloaders and file systems.

The software lets you choose between the usual file systems, namely FAT 32 and NTFS, but you can also set it to FAT 16 and exFAT. What's more, RMPrepUSB gives you the possibility of enabling various overrides, which make your drive behave and be handled in a different way. For example, if you tick the "2PTNS" option, the software will add a second, hidden partition to your drive, to make the BIOS treat it like a local hard drive, instead of a removable device.

Before you execute the operation you've prepared, you can run various tests and prepare the USB. You can test its speed and size, and you may even run a QEMU emulator to run additional tests. Finally, you can decide to install grub4dos, Syslinux, WEE, as well as various bootloaders. The software lets you choose between various Windows installers and PEs, MSDOS, FreeDOS and others. The best part is that you can copy multiple images to your drive and boot any one of them, which is a fairly simple task, thanks to the automatically-created menu system.

When it comes to creating bootable USB flash drives, few utilities can provide as many features as RMPrepUSB.