I cannot for the life of me successfully create a bootable USB drive with the windows 7 installation files on it. I've done it many times before, and never failed so often. Everytime I boot, it just ignores the USB drive and boots off the SSD instead (and yes, I did configure the bios to boot from the USB first)

I can operate from either Windows 7 or (Arch)Linux. I have confirmed that the hardware supports booting from USB, as I have installed OpenSUSE on this same computer from this same USB drive recently (the tool I used is called imageusb, I tried using it for Windows too, but it failed.)

What I have tried is [the manual method](http://bootableusb.net/install-windows-7-usb-drive-easy-way/) utilizing diskpart and command prompt, and the [automated method](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-download-tool) using Microsoft's official utility for the job. I have tried NTFS, I have tried FAT32, I have tried USB 3 and USB 2 (I have a USB3 sandisk usb flash drive) all fails. I even tried two different ISOs.

I have many times successfully done this with the manual method before, but this time something just isn't falling into place and it's driving me crazy! Naturally, I have also tried the two above mentioned methods several times each, mostly out of desperation.

What should I try next?