First, the USB drive needs to be prepared for the image by using Windows' diskpart command-line disk partitioning utility to re-partition and format it as a bootable NTFS drive.

Click "Start" to create your bootable Windows XP thumb drive. Depending on the speed of your computer, this process can take 15 to 20 minutes to complete.

Windows can and will crash — and after it does it may not boot normally. To be prepared for worst-case scenarios, learn how to create a bootable recovery partition on your system drive.